SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site

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dave23

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SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Monday, July 02, 2012 9:23 PM (permalink)

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Hi All,

Environment:
1 x Primary CM2012 server
1 x Site System Server (with Management Point role installed)

What i am looking to do is utilise the new High Availability feature i have read so much about in the links below, so that if 1 MP goes down the other can still service clients.
First of all, is this possible, and if so has anyone done this yet?
Secondly, i have actually attempted this by following MS's guide to SQL replica found , and added the MP role to the Site System Server. I then installed the SMS Provider and console on the Site System Server. When i try connect to this via the admin console i get the error attached. I wanted to get the console working first before i mimicked a server failure.
"SMSAdminUI.log" also shows the below error. I also have numerous errors in the MP_xxxx.log files. Clearly something is a miss and hoping you guys can help out. I've confirmed WMI, SMS Admins access etc. Thanks in advance.

-----------------------
[1, PID:4420][07/02/2012 16:37:07] :System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException\r\nProvider machine not found
Parameter name: configMgrServerPath\r\n   at Microsoft.ConfigurationManagement.ManagementProvider.WqlQueryEngine.WqlConnectionManager.Connect(String configMgrServerPath)\r\n
[1, PID:4420][07/02/2012 16:37:07] :Transport error; failed to connect, message: 'Provider machine not found
Parameter name: configMgrServerPath'\r\nMicrosoft.ConfigurationManagement.ManagementProvider.SmsConnectionException\r\nProvider machine not found
Parameter name: configMgrServerPath\r\n   at Microsoft.ConfigurationManagement.ManagementProvider.WqlQueryEngine.WqlConnectionManager.Connect(String configMgrServerPath)
   at Microsoft.ConfigurationManagement.AdminConsole.SmsSiteConnectionNode.GetConnectionManagerInstance(String connectionManagerInstance)\r\nProvider machine not found
Parameter name: configMgrServerPath
\r\nSystem.ArgumentOutOfRangeException\r\nProvider machine not found
Parameter name: configMgrServerPath\r\n   at Microsoft.ConfigurationManagement.ManagementProvider.WqlQueryEngine.WqlConnectionManager.Connect(String configMgrServerPath)\r\n
[1, PID:4420][07/02/2012 16:37:07] :System.Management.ManagementException\r\nNot found \r\n   at System.Management.ManagementException.ThrowWithExtendedInfo(ManagementStatus errorCode)
   at System.Management.ManagementObject.InvokeMethod(String methodName, ManagementBaseObject inParameters, InvokeMethodOptions options)
   at Microsoft.ConfigurationManagement.ManagementProvider.WqlQueryEngine.WqlConnectionManager.ExecuteMethod(String methodClass, String methodName, Dictionary`2 methodParameters, Boolean traceParameters)\r\nManagementException details:
instance of __ExtendedStatus
{
Operation = "ExecMethod";
ParameterInfo = "SMS_ObjectLock";
ProviderName = "WinMgmt";
};
\r\n
-----------------------

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#1

dave23 Total Posts : 8 Scores: 0 Reward points : 1850 Joined: 7/2/2012 Location: Australia Status: offline	Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Wednesday, August 08, 2012 7:39 AM (permalink) 0 Anyone?? Hopefully SCCM Guru Webcast scheduled for 15/08/2012 will answer this. Fingers crossed.
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johnh

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Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Thursday, August 09, 2012 8:24 PM (permalink)

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I'm afraid I don't have any answers for you Dave (yet), but I have just started looking at this same issue as I'm designing a new 2012 deployment and would like to include HA, provided the solution is not too fiddly to setup in practice. Planning to lab a couple of scenarios using a CAS+PRI and standalone PRI, both with additional site systems and distributed roles. The organisation has 2 primary data centre locations with admin presence, so my thinking is one primary site with the site server at the main data centre and additional site servers both here and at the other main data centre. I will come back to this thread with my results.

I've had a little play with the site backup and recovery too, but this all seems very fiddly when you consider that you could rely on vmware or DPM to backup and recovery a box easily (if you choose to house the site and DB on the same box).
Also going to take a look at the webcast mentioned here, although it's being held at 4:30am Australia time :(

#3

dave23 Total Posts : 8 Scores: 0 Reward points : 1850 Joined: 7/2/2012 Location: Australia Status: offline	Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Friday, August 10, 2012 1:37 AM (permalink) 0 Hey johnh...thanks for your reply...i wait with baited breath. FYI: re: Webcast...they offer a replay a couple of days after so no need to really get up early (unless you wanted to ask the host some questions).
	#4

johnh

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Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Tuesday, August 14, 2012 3:37 AM (permalink)

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Hi Dave,
I did some playing in my lab. My setup comprised:
A dedicated SQL server (SQL01) with SQL instances for CAS and P01 servers.
A CAS and single primary site (P01).
A site system server (P02) with the MP role installed, targetting a replica of the site database on SQL02
A second SQL server (SQL02) holding a replica of the site database.
A Win7 client initially pointing to P01 as it's management point.
SMS provider installed on SQL01

To summarise, I cannot achieve HA of the MP from a management perspective (using the config mgr console). When the primary site server is offline and I try to launch the console, I see the same errors as you.

However, I can demonstrate HA from the perspective of the client communicating with the redundant MP when the primary site server is shutdown, and/or the primary site db is shutdown. I can go into the config manager console (from the control panel) on the client and see the "assigned management point" is updated to my redundant site system MP (P02) after 5-10 mins. I assume that P02 is still able to provide policy to the client from the DB replica. I wonder what happens to any status messages the client might send back to the MP during the primary outage though - presumably they are lost and client resumes sending status to the primary site server MP when it comes back online. So really how useful is this scenario, particularly if you can't manage the MP through the console?

The thing is, I'm tending to think that this desired HA just isn't possible in 2012. Having re-read this article () the wording suggests that this functionality is purely aimed at taking load away from the primary site database server. It doesn't appear to be aimed at providing HA of the MP from an administrative point of view.

In addition, the "Planning for High Availability" article () goes as far as to state that the Site Server is not supported as a High Availability component. The article also contains this wording "Configuration Manager does not provide a real-time service and you must expect it to operate with some data latency. Therefore, it is unusual for most scenarios that involve a temporary interruption of service to become a critical problem".

It leads me to conclude that it is not possible to make the Site Server and management console truly HA. Instead Microsoft encourage us to utilise the built-in backup and recovery tools. For my money the same result is more easily achieved with the HA provided by a decent VMware solution, and if you decided you really want 100% HA of the site server you could implement VMware Fault Tolerance. I think a decent nightly backup of the site server (using VDR or DPM) should be sufficient, and an administration outage of a few mins while the server boots back up on another vm host is acceptable in the event of host failure.

Be interesting to see the content in the webex tomorrow in any case.
Cheers,
John

#5

dave23

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Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Tuesday, August 14, 2012 9:52 AM (permalink)

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Great Reply John,

You managed to get further than me with the SQL Replica and client failover portion then. I noticed you used dedicated SQL servers which i didn't (i hosted the SQL DB and replica on each of the SCCM servers so not sure if that's an error on my part, but i can't see how it would matter).

I agree that without the Admin Console it's kinda pointless using this built-in HA solution, and in fact (as you suggested) i've already added a VM infrastructure with VMware Fault Tolerance into my design instead.

Let's hope we have more answers after SCCM Guru Webcast.

#6

bmason505

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Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Tuesday, August 14, 2012 11:46 AM (permalink)

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Hi guys, like John points out, there is no such thing as true HA in CM12. Period. That's simply because there is only one exec running on a primary server that can't failover to another server. But we can make moves to get more resiliency and MP replicas is one of those moves. The idea behind the replica is that if that primary site and its exec are down, clients can still reach their MP and pick up instructions to go get software or patch. And because you can have more than one MP, the odds of an outage affecting clients goes down.

So I'll have a demo tomorrow to show just how to make a replica and if there is enough time, I'll show what to look for to make sure it's working.

The ability to have multiple providers isn't a way to bypass the primary and give an MP instructions. It's just a way to offload admin load elsewhere.

Brian Mason
MCTS\MS MVP - ECM
http://www.mnscug.org/

#7

dave23 Total Posts : 8 Scores: 0 Reward points : 1850 Joined: 7/2/2012 Location: Australia Status: offline	Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Tuesday, August 14, 2012 7:14 PM (permalink) 0 Thanks Brian. Who better to respond that the host of the Webcast! I feel like we're finally getting the right answers after numerous months of going in circles. I look forward to your Webcast to fill in any gaps.
	#8

johnh Total Posts : 3 Scores: 0 Reward points : 360 Joined: 8/9/2012 Status: offline	Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Tuesday, August 14, 2012 10:01 PM (permalink) 0 Thanks for taking the time to reply Brian, it is helpful getting some confirmation on these questions from someone in the know. I'm looking forward to the webcast, although I might have to watch the delayed rerun given it starts at 4:30am our time! Thanks John
	#9

dave23

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Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Sunday, August 26, 2012 9:12 PM (permalink)

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Hey Brian,

Now that i've seen your webcast (as per Slide #12 of your slidepack), and as you've alluded to above, it appears that the only way to achieve HA with MPs is if there are 2 or more "Site Systems" within the Primary Site with the MP role installed on them. From there, via database replicas, clients will simply receive a list of MPs for that site and if one goes down it will failover to next one in the list.
However, if the Primary (ie "Site Server") goes down you are still screwed as you have no access to SCCM Console, and therefore can't deploy any new apps/patches/policies until it is back up.

So i have a few questions (which i couldn't ask on Webcast as i didn't attend live presentation)...

If the Primary does go offline, I assume clients will still be able to receive pre-existing adverts/policies from the Site System MP replicas?
If so, how are status messages, inventory, etc handled once the Primary is back online? ie Would the replica MPs queue all this info and pass it to the Primary when it's back online?
Is there a risk of losing any of the above info while the Primary is down?
Do Secondaries that use Proxy MP behave the same? ie other than being in a different SCCM Site, are clients still able to receive pre-exsiting adverts/policies from these Secondaries if the Primary is down?

As you mentioned, the only benefit of doing the above is to take the load off the Primary, which i'd think would only be beneficial in larger environments (depending on server hardware you are using).

Regards,
Dave.

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bmason505

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Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Friday, August 31, 2012 10:33 AM (permalink)

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1. Yep. That's the cool thing about having a replica; that needed info is still available. Now if you didn't have a replica, they'd just go off whatever they last heard to do.
2. The MP holds onto all of those messages and then dumps it onto the primary when it comes back (also if the SMSExec is dead on the primary, but the shares are still available, the MP will dump these files to the primary site's inboxes).
3. No risk of loss as everything is written to disk.
4. In CM07 you can put a replica on a secondary site's MP. In CM12, it's all automatically there with the new DRS replication.

And it's not just load off the primary, but a benefit of machines getting the last possible instruction you made in the console. For example, you send an ad to install software on Friday night and a laptop gets that ad on Wednesday. On Thursday, you find an issue with the application and delete or expire the ad. The primary goes down Friday morning and the laptop comes back into the office on Friday afternoon. It never gets the message to not install the software so it does. Perhaps that's a bad thing. Or it could be the reverse. You have an emergency patch to go out but that laptop never gets the message.

Brian Mason
MCTS\MS MVP - ECM
http://www.mnscug.org/

#11

dave.k.marshall

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Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Sunday, September 23, 2012 11:25 PM (permalink)

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Is it possible to use site servers with local databases in CM12 to essentially replace Secondary Sites? I understand you would lose the ability to throttle upstream.

Is there any guide on the bandwidth requirements to support constant database replication? I watched Brian's excellent webcast but didn't hear this mentioned.
Thanks,
Dave M

#12

bmason505

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Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Wednesday, September 26, 2012 11:23 PM (permalink)

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Replace a secondary site with what? A primary site? That you can do, but the hope is that you can replace a secondary with just a DP and throttle the DP. Could you put a remote MP there too? Yes, but any client from anywhere could try to use it. That's why you'd either want a secondary site or just skip the remote MP. It's often possible to skip that MP as it's far less traffic than a DP. But doing so depends on lots of factors. I've been lucky enough to get by with MPs only in the datacenter and just use Nomad at the client side. The MP traffic hasn't hurt us.

Brian Mason
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http://www.mnscug.org/

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dave.k.marshall

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Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Thursday, September 27, 2012 6:35 PM (permalink)

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Thanks Brian. Apologies I was mistakenly thinking that MP selection was not random and selected from the boundary group with some network location awareness.

Unfortunately some of our WAN links are as low bandwidth as 3G. I'm not sure that we can sustain MP traffic to the datacentre or we would essentially use the same design. Sitecodes need to disappear, flatten, or they must stay the same in CM12, which is why I was temporarily excited about regional DP with a local replica of the MP. However, MP traffic is perhaps no more taxing than SQL replication.

#14

TylerThePyro

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Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Thursday, October 25, 2012 12:12 PM (permalink)

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I recently migrated to an HA environment also. In regards to the console not being able to connect to the database when the primary site is down, that is something that is easily fixed. It is not explicit from within the console on how to resolve this. That is because you need to install another "SMS Provider" from the Console setup wizard. Usually located in %Program Files%\Microsoft Configuration Manager\bin\X64\SETUP.EXE. Click next at the welcome screen > Perform site maintenance or reset this site > Modify SMS Provider configuration. From there enter the FQDN of another site system. You will see that your primary site is the only SMS Provider. Seems like you can add as many as you want. SMS provider is to CM12 Console as MP's are to CCM Clients. The console will randomly select a provider and keep it cached. Now you should be able to access the console/database if the primary goes down. Very key in an HA environment.

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dave23

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Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Thursday, October 25, 2012 5:47 PM (permalink)

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Hey TylerThePyro...it all sounds good in theory and this was what i was trying to achieve initially, but have you actually tested this to confirm it works as you've discussed? ie Can you shutdown your Primary CM2012 box and you have no loss of functionality?

Regards,
KeenToEmbraceTrueHA

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TylerThePyro

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Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Friday, October 26, 2012 1:53 AM (permalink)

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That's what I'm using in my production right now. I had to show my manager that i could take down the primary site and essentially still log into the database, deploy packages, even deploy images via PXE. I migrated from an all-in-one CM12 site server to a fully HA CM12 environment. So i went through all the hicups if you wanna head that way too. i can give some pointers.

#17

bmason505 Total Posts : 3263 Scores: 244 Reward points : 78180 Joined: 1/23/2003 Location: Minneapolis, MN Status: offline	Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Friday, October 26, 2012 4:38 PM (permalink) 0 I wouldn't call it fully HA as there really isn't such a thing. The provider can give you access to send something out, but that status can only come back to a live primary. Brian Mason MCTS\MS MVP - ECM http://www.mnscug.org/
	#18

Makii

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Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Friday, December 21, 2012 7:05 AM (permalink)

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Hi Tyler,
Im very much interested in doing what you have quoted below, i have tried but not been succesfull. Any pointes you can give me will be appreciated..

Cheers..

TylerThePyro

That's what I'm using in my production right now. I had to show my manager that i could take down the primary site and essentially still log into the database, deploy packages, even deploy images via PXE. I migrated from an all-in-one CM12 site server to a fully HA CM12 environment. So i went through all the hicups if you wanna head that way too. i can give some pointers.

Hi Tyler

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carlitog

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Re:SCCM 2012 - High Availability by using multiple MP roles within 1 site Wednesday, March 13, 2013 8:55 PM (permalink)

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Hi all, has anyone else managed to get the SCCM Console to run from an alternate provider when the Primary Site Server is down?

I have a single primary site and have added an additonal site server and installed the SCCM Provider onto this server as well as other roles (MP/DP etc).

However if I shutdown my primary site server, I cant open the SCCM console i.e. it doesnt use the provider on the 2nd site server. Looking in the SmsAdminUI.log i get "The RPC Server is unavilable", which I assume is it trying to connect to the primary site server.

How does the console know what providers are available i.e. are they publsihed in AD and can you force the console to use a specific provider?

Thanks for your help.

Carl

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