MECM/SCCM Advice Needed ~

[Swaleway_Techie]

Hello!

 

Thanks for checking out the post.

 

Following Microsoft announcing that they do not support MDT for Win 11 and recommend using MECM for any deployments moving forward, I am struggling to get my head around how to set it up to deploy Win 11 to our PCs via PXE. Essentially we want to set up a like for like MDT replacement within MECM, but it seems easier said than done!

 

We are a Multi Academy trust of 15 schools, and don't want to have to pull OS images and software all over the internet, but then don't want to manually copy and paste software and images everywhere if MECM will help distribute them across our schools. We also just need it to image over the network at the moment, don't want to deploy software via software centre or anything like that, just want to hit F12, boot to PXE and get list of task sequences to image PCs

 

Does anyone have a similar set up in terms of a multi academy trust who is running MECM/SCCM who can give me an insight into how they have laid out the structure of MECM, in particular for for image deployment over PXE?

 

Any help is much appreciated!

 

Thanks

[Jonah]

We have a site server at our “central” school, which is where task sequences are created, applications are packaged, etc. and MECM as a whole is managed.

 

Then each school has a local distribution point, with the necessary images/packages distributed to them from the central site server.

 

The distribution points are PXE enabled - so there’s the initial first time distribution of the packages etc. from the site server to the DPs, then all the clients at the local site use their DP for imaging, application installs, etc.

[CrootUK]

We have a central server at one secondary and a DP at another, all our other schools then PXE boot back to one of these depending on which one physically has less hops via our MPLS.

 

Did also used to be local MDT but on the aim to centralise.

[Swaleway_Techie]

Thanks for the replies!

 

I see so maybe we should look at keeping things simple and go for a central primary and Dist Points, rather than multi primaries and a CAS.

 

We did worry about redundancy, as if our primary site went offline for whatever reason our remaining 14 schools could then not image as they need to contact the primary to be able to image as we found out in previous testing with secondary sites and primary sites. Do you worry about redundancy in the same way?

 

Thanks