Following on from my previous article on System Center 2012 Configuration Manager where I talked about setting up a good test last, we can now move on to whether we need a CAS for the company Configuration Manager is being installed into.
Let’s start with what CAS means:
Central Administration Site
This is not the same as the Central Site in previous versions of the products. This is literally a Central site where administration and operations for everything can be performed, for everything, everywhere. It is no more significant as that. The old model of partitioning administration using Primary Sites has gone. Folks implementing this product should pay careful attention to the new features, since they require a new way of doing things, such as RBA making administration partition using Primary Sites redundant, and the capabilities of the Secondary with it’s Database, and the Distribution Point with its Sender like behaviour all contributing and influencing the design.
The Configuration Manager Documentation team have laid out the basic reasoning for implementing a CAS in the online document, check out Planning for Sites and Hierarchies in Configuration Manager and under About Site Types in Configuration Manager is the Determine Whether to Install a Central Administration Site section you’ll find a bunch of bullets to guide you into making the decision.
Brian Mason Configuration Manager MVP * wrote a bunch of pros and cons on having a CAS which I think alongside the MS information, pretty much gives you the key points for taking the plunge, or not.
* Brian’s article can be found here on the Minnesota System Center User group website
I think it all just boils down to two questions, so I flowcharted them to make it even easier to decide when and when not to use a CAS:
Starting out with a Central gives you centralised management and reporting, but means a whole lot of complexity. Weigh the advantages and disadvantages wisely. Choosing a CAS and finding out you didn’t need it isn’t that painful or restrictive at the end of the day.
Before we wrap up, there is another important design decision to be made, which edition of SQL to use.
It’s not that important to understand how SQL Partitioning works, but its impact should be understood. It is important to gauge now whether you’ll ever go over 50,000 Clients for the life cycle of the entire hierarchy. If you think you’ll come close to 50,000 Clients and choose the wrong edition, you won’t see a 50,001th Client without a rebuild (2012.05).
And thus, another simplistic flowchart follows:
That covers the reasoning for a CAS well enough, in the next guide I’ll begin installing the CAS for the lab. I’ve elected to implement a CAS so that we can cover as much of the feature stack as possible for the guides. Check out the System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Documentation Library for further reading on the product.
That covers the reasoning for a CAS well enough, in the next guide I’ll begin installing the CAS for the lab. I’ve elected to implement a CAS so that we can cover as much of the feature stack as possible for the guides.
Check out the System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Documentation Library for further reading on the product.