SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade?

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SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade?

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All Forums >> [Management Products] >> System Center Products >> System Center Configuration Manager >> SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade?

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SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade? - 12/6/2007 5:10:23 PM

pbrown165

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I have a SMS 2003 SP3 setup with seven distribution points servers and 500 clients. SMS2003 has been running here for a number of years but I just recently started to use it as it was intended. The previous admin didn't like SMS and used a VBS login script to configure everything. Have you ever seen a 3000 line login script?

Anyway, I want to upgrade to SCCM and have media in hand. Is this product all that they say it is? I really want the Software Update Point feature for workstation patching. The new imaging capabilities are interesting too as is the remote laptop support.

I'd like to here other's war stories before I get this thing going.

Patrick

Post #: 1

RE: SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade? - 12/7/2007 8:35:37 AM

mcarriere893

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I've found ConfigMgr to be a huge leap forward from SMS 2003 (and that was really good). Some of the features I really like are the patching (takes a little practice to get it nailed down), the OSD-super!, and Desired Configuration Management. These are all built-in now instead of add-ons. DCM manifests are even downloadable from Microsoft and other vendors.

Best to do lots of reading and testing before deploying in your production environment.

Plenty of experienced ConfigMgr admins here and on other forums are doing a great job answering questions. Technet has ConfigMgr forums as well were some of the Microsoft ConfigMgr product team members themselves are answering questions.

_____________________________

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Microsoft MVP-SMS
www.SMSUG.ca

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RE: SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade? - 12/10/2007 4:46:34 PM

pbrown165

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I've been reading all I can. It looks good if the product actually does what the documentation says. I've been working through the prerequisites.

I have installed SP2 for Windows Server 2003
SQL has been upgraded to 2005
I enabled secure key exchange
I just extended the schema

I'm close. I need to chase down three machines not on XPsp2 and have some duplicate object IDs to find.

--Patrick

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Post #: 3

RE: SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade? - 12/11/2007 2:28:33 AM

lnesta431

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Hi,

We are considering an upgrade as well, but we want to renew our SQL data because we are using the same
database since SMS 2.0.

Also we want to avoid to unavailability of OSD, OSD with SCCM is completly different and apparently you cannot easily migrate our existing images (wim format)

What we want to do this is building an exising SCCM environment next to our current SMS 2003 SP3 environment.

I know this is an expensive solution but this gives us a chance to renew our hardware.

The plans are then to migrate the clients subnet by subnet to avoid overlapping boundaries.

What do you think is this a realistic idea? Do we have to take into count other possible issues?
Anyone else with the same migration plans? Many tnx for your input!!

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RE: SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade? - 12/11/2007 9:24:34 AM

wbracken

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I am planning on doing the same barring any potential issues with extending the AD schema for SCCM while still running 2003..anyone know if this is an issue?

If not, I will be doing just that, bringing up the new server and migrating clients over. I have already done this once with a rebuild of our SMS 2003 infrastructure. (I inherited a dirty SMS infrastructure) so I know its feasible again depending on the AD Schema extension info...

As far as OSD goes that will take a bit more planning for us. With the move from SMS2003 to SCCM also comes the move from RIS to WDS (managed by SCCM). Still early in my labbing of SCCM but am sure it can be done with enough lab time and planning. :)

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RE: SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade? - 12/11/2007 1:29:17 PM

mhobbs

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We currently have the SCCM Schema in place in production and are doing some staging of the SCCM servers in production. I have seen no issues with having the SCCM schema in place while still running SMS.

We will be doing a side by side migration so both infrastructures will be in place at the same time. We will uninstall the SMS secondaries and reinstall them as SCCM. Then migrate the clients.

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RE: SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade? - 12/11/2007 2:39:37 PM

wbracken

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Thanks mhobbs! Glad to hear there seems to be no inherent problems with extending the schema for sccm while still running 2003..

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RE: SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade? - 12/11/2007 5:49:18 PM

pbrown165

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I'm getting closer on my upgrade. The only prerequisite left is some duplicate client IDs. I ran the SMS 2003 report to show duplicate GUIDs. I'm using the TRANGUID /R utility to generate new GUIDs on any machine in the report. Only seven to go and I'm ready for the upgrade.

I'll be doing an in place upgrade. My hardware is good and SMS is healthy.

--Patrick

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RE: SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade? - 12/12/2007 3:58:33 AM

atodd

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We are also at the early stages of planning our SCCM upgrade and have concluded that it will be easier to do a side by side migration as we do not need any of the existing data. I'm glad to hear that other are planning to to do same, all the best with your SCCM upgrades.

Ady

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RE: SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade? - 12/13/2007 6:42:45 PM

pbrown165

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I just finished my upgrade. It was a very smooth process. I'm starting the figure out the software update points (I think).

Time will tell if this was a good move. The only documentation that I know of is from Microsoft's Technet site and that sucks IMHO. What good is the printer friendly view if all that prints are links to other documents

.

--Patrick

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RE: SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade? - 12/17/2007 3:30:17 PM

pbrown165

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Here are some things I learned after the upgrade.

1) The custom changes in my SMS_DEF.MOF file were not migrated over. I had to re-edit the file. That works fine again.
2) My MP did not properly upgrade because WebDAV was installed but not permitted. It would be nice if the installer or the prerequisite checker had looked for this. The reinstall worked great once WebDAV was permitted in IIS.
3) The client push also upgrades BITS to version 2.5. This requires a reboot. I resolved this by pushing BITS 2.5 as a package with WOL over the weekend. The clients can now install without the reboot.

--Patrick

< Message edited by pbrown165 -- 12/17/2007 3:52:17 PM >

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RE: SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade? - 12/17/2007 3:31:28 PM

wbracken

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Thanks for sharing your findings! Much appreciated.

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RE: SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade? - 12/20/2007 12:48:26 PM

pbrown165

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Another followup.

My Advertisement Status was not displaying any messages. I found that there is now a hotfix to correct this. Lookup KB945898 for more details. It is working after installing.

I am getting a critical database error in the SMS_COLLECTION_EVALUATOR. I haven't resolved that yet.

I created an advertisement last night to upgrade the 1e WoL Agent to 5.1. The advert was received by the clients but not run. I need to figure that out.

More later.

--Patrick

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RE: SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade? - 1/2/2008 2:25:55 PM

rjarrett

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Do you want the blue pill or the red pill?

I enjoy SMS 2003 because it is incredibly capable. All indications are the SCCM is better, as Mark Carriere testifies. However, you must always remember that your dealing with a product that makes many claims that don't live up to your expectations, desires, or needs. I will give you two simple examples.

First, Microsoft is all-over tauting the benefits of AD integration. In reality, SMS 2003 could be considered to be an AD interrogator. While there are many hooks into AD, the most important for software distribution is not. Specifically, we wanted to use our AD groups to drive our collections. What we would have liked was real-time, integrated group membership awareness. Instead, what you get is a "discovery" process that interrogates AD, writes discovery data, processes that data, and then is available for queries based upon it. This means that when you add a computer to a security group, it does not get added to the collection until it is "discovered" to be in that group. In a truly integrated system, you should be able to set your group membership criteria and re-run the query. It should dynamically look up which resources are in the group. It doesn't! It adds the very time consuming discovery processing between group assignment and collection membership.

Second, Microsoft brags about the scheduling features by comparison with GPO delivery. Yes, you can setup an advertisement to trigger in the future. The problem is, they have not figured out how to stagger the downloads or "phase-in" the collection membership. The result is that all scheduled clients hit the distribution points at the "available time" and hammer it. The result, you end up having to contrive deployment schedules, or add distribution points, or something. Ideally, you would like to be able to say deploy a product on this date and stagger the download over a 24 hour period leading up to that time. This would reduce the demands on the server and network while providing predicatable delivery at a scheduled time.

I don't believe SCCM has addressed these examples any better than SMS 2003. With this said, you can use SMS\SCCM very effectively, if you take the time to design a software deployment model that fits your business. I like the product and look forward to getting back into it full-time sometime, but it does take a bit of cool-aid drinking first...

< Message edited by rjarrett -- 1/2/2008 2:26:23 PM >

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Rob Jarrett
SMS\VB Development

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RE: SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade? - 9/22/2008 8:10:44 AM 1 votes

joeltje

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waauw...

i'd really like to see that 3000 line logonscript.
any chance of posting it (or sending it to me?)

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SMS2003>>SCCM - Should I upgrade? - 9/23/2008 5:02:54 PM

rjarrett

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We did the side-by-side upgrade from SMS 2.0 to SMS 2003. It certainly has some issues (e.g. extra hardware, etc.) but it was a perfectly acceptable way to proceed. We migrated our clients site-by-site.

The only major issue I recall was that we changed from Network Discovery to AD Discovery. As a result, we lost visibility on a lot of resources. It also took some time to get our workstation discovery fully populated. Remember, if SMS cannot resolve the AD discovered item, it skips it. I believe SCCM is the same way. So we "lost" a lot of machines, mostly laptops, until they came back on-line and reestablished themselves with DHCP\DNS and became resolvable.

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Let me know if this helped...

Rob Jarrett
SMS\VB Development

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Post #: 16