Configuration Manager v.Next - Hierarchy Design

This presentation build on the previous Configuration Manager v.Next talks and is around designing your architecture. For those non techies, skip to the next post now!

You should have a Central Administration Site, 1 Primary and Secondary's as required.

Central Admin Site - Location for all admin and reporting. No client data processing, no clients assigned and limited site roles.

Primary Site - services clients in well connected network. No tiered primaries, only add more for scale out; not needed for data segmentation, client agent settings or network bandwidth control.

Secondary - services clients in remote locations where network control is needed. Bundle Proxy MP and DP fr install. Tiered content routing via Secondary SQL replication.

Advanced features (multicast/streaming) are not available on file share only DPs (or W2k3 ones).

You can throttle and/or schedule to remote DPs

Branch DPs - can be run on a workstation, 100 or fewer clients, BITS gives you enough network control.
Utilise branche cache if you have W2k8 R2 (Mars traditional will) - they have seen a 71% drop in network utilisation at one customer.

Replication stays file based for content, but is SQL for global and site data.
SQL reporting services is the only reporting tool that can be used.

Topology views in Sites tab rather than event viewer - this will greatly aid troubleshooting replicating as the picture will show the alert and the link state.