MECM/SCCM Hierarchy for Academy Trust

[Swaleway_Techie]

Hi,

 

We are looking into moving out imaging operations over to MECM from MDT, as Microsoft seem to be trying to phase out MDT from Win 11 onwards (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/configmgr/mdt/release-notes#supported-platforms) but we are struggling to get our heads round the best hierarchy to go for.

 

We have 14 separate Academies across a fairly small geographical location of one UK city.

 

Thing is we don't want to image over the internet and so only having one primary site, with 13 secondary sites is off the table as if the primary site was to go offline, we could then not image at any academy at all. We tested this last year and tried to manage with one main primary server, but if the primary was turned off secondary sites could not facilitate imaging at all.

 

We then thought we could do a structure where we have 4 primary sites with the other 10 academies shared out as secondary sites, but in this situation do we need a CAS?

 

CAS seems to add some resilience, I think? So if a primary went down we could point PCs at another primary site and they would be able to pick up the same image from there (over the internet) as the CAS would keep software and apps synced across all sites? Also we can build task sequences once and sync them to all sites to make things easy with CAS.

 

Does this sound correct?

 

MECM is all very confusing for someone who has only ever used MDT and just wants a platform to use for PC imaging and nothing else at this stage.

 

Microsoft's documentation on MECM all talks around huge organisations with offices in global locations, and 100s of thousands of users when talking about a CAS set up, so it sounds like we don't need that, but I think we might be best doing it?

 

Can anyone in a similar situation expand on their MECM set up with multisite and offer any advice to which way we should go?

[Jonah]

Primary site and DP at your “main” location, and PXE-enabled distribution points at your remaining schools?

[Swaleway_Techie]

We did explore this but struggled to image with just PXE DP, but I assume from your suggestion it is possible to do this. I will do some reading about it, thanks for your response.