SCCM - Thoughts?

[Crispin]

Hi all,

Just wanted to get some feedback from anyone who uses/has used SCCM on their network.

I'm downloading the trial at the moment to test on my home network on a hyper-v machine.

Are there any major issues or gripes people have with it? In terms of value, is it worth it?

I've been trying to decipher Microsoft licensing for SCCM and am utterly confused. Would anyone be able to give a ballpark figure for how much it would cost to license a network running around 800 desktops and 200 laptops?

Any thoughts would be appreciated, thanks!

[AngryTechnician]

I trialled it last year, but it seemed incredibly complicated for what it did, and I never actually got our clients to start talking to it. Perhaps I was being thick, but the difficulty in getting it to work just seemed far too much effort for the benefit we would have got from it.

Our NM dealt with the licensing; I seem to recall that with our existing Schools Agreement the incremental cost was quite low.

[MatthewL]

We have just installed our first server, not had time to play with it yet.

[imiddleton25]

We use it here for about 80% of it functions , still learning to do more when I have time its a great tool and as we used sms 2 then sms 2003 we have had a lot experience of using it.

We have a school agreement and the cost is not high. think we pay £200 for server licence and the CAL is part of our desktop pack under schols agreement.

[ZeroHour]

We have a school agreement and the cost is not high. think we pay £200 for server licence and the CAL is part of our desktop pack under schols agreement.

imiddleton25: What level of desktop agreement do you have? Did you have to bolt it on or were you already licensed? We are desktop schools agreement v3 level a but we dont have a sccm license yet as we are trialing it and I am looking into costs. It would be amazing if it was already part of the pack.

[tmcd35]

Am I right in thinking the SCVMM component is available separately if all you want to do is manage your Hyper-V servers? I'm looking at starting an Hyper-V role out later this year and was considering this for next year. I had it in my mind (can't remember where from) that I could get a SCVMM 2008 Workgroup Edition for about £500 to cover the 4 or 5 Hyper-V servers we'll eventually have?

[Tricky_Dicky]

I've used SCCM in the past and once set up found it to be a fantastic piece of software. Few pit falls to bear in mind are the initial setup took quite a while and that was with a lot of telephone support. The second is that it uses a Database backend and so I was advised against running it on a virtual environment due to the amount of IO reads going on.

But if you can afford it and set it up and then figure out the correct procedure for creating the installer packages it is very good.

Rich

[karlieb]

A bit late in replying to this but though I might as well anyway...

If you have a School Agreement and have either of the Core CALs or the Desktop School CAL (which includes Vista, Office and Core CAL) then you will have the client device licenses for SCCM.

Am I right in thinking the SCVMM component is available separately if all you want to do is manage your Hyper-V servers? I'm looking at starting an Hyper-V role out later this year and was considering this for next year. I had it in my mind (can't remember where from) that I could get a SCVMM 2008 Workgroup Edition for about £500 to cover the 4 or 5 Hyper-V servers we'll eventually have?

That is correct. SCVMM Workgroup Edition can manage up to 5 physical hosts. Pricing wise then you'd be looking at around £100 (but much less if you're doing it under School Agreement).

If you're going to grow past 5 hosts then pricing does go up quite a bit for Enterprise Edition.

[craigcamacho]

Its awesome. We are using it in the school i am at and you simply plug your machines in to the network, advertise the OS and to a single machine or OU then pxe boot the clients and your away. It will do the OS, updates, software packages, put it on the domain and activate it too and saves a heck of a lot of time as you can do a lot of machines in one go.

[Gatt]

We've used SCCM in the past and are planning to use it again this year
We mainly use it for the Remote Tools but really want to get it to deploy software, OS's and WSUS too...

Also looking at implementing SCOM as well..

[john]

So is it really that simple to use? Plug in PXE boot and it does it all for me?

[ZeroHour]

So is it really that simple to use? Plug in PXE boot and it does it all for me?

Its not exactly simple to setup, but yeh thats how nice it can be once done. Windows-noob did help a lot with its guide but I am still getting my head around it.

[Theblacksheep]

Its not exactly simple to setup, but yeh thats how nice it can be once done. Windows-noob did help a lot with its guide but I am still getting my head around it.

Lots of new lingo with SCCM: Advertising, DPs etc etc....


it not the easiest thing i've setup either. Took me about 3 installs to get it working (even then I binned that and need to set it up 'for real' next time) and installing packages properly.... mind you i did pick CS4 as my test package, but it trickle installed silently and just appeared an hour later!

[jc1875]

We use it mainly of hardware inventory, WSUS and a couple of applications that wouldnt go out via Group Policy. This year i've ditched RIS and taken the jump to WDS and SCCM.
Found this guide invaluable
The Deployment Guys : SCCM 2007 and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit - Video Walkthrough

Adding drivers etc seem much easier than RIS. We've only got 40 new desktops (HP DC7900s) to roll out this year so if it all goes pete tong then it's no biggy

[TheScarfedOne]

I think i did a blog on this a while ago... defo check out the technet blog, and also windows noob.