There's a good bit of dysfunction going on, such as two weeks after starting to look into what's needed for configuration manager there's still no authoritative answer on "talk to this person to see what Microsoft licensing we have." 😛

I'm trying to get an idea of what's needed myself, and most of what I found is in relation to those who already have System Center and having current SA entitles you to Configuration Manager Current Branch.

@Obsolesce said in PXE Boot & Software deployment:

@gjacobse said in PXE Boot & Software deployment:

What is your preference on PXE Boot deployment and software deployment?

SCCM and Software Center seem to be a joke here. Although it could be the team responsible for managing it.

We have a tremendous amount of issues with PXE Boot deployments, not installing the right image and thus nothing is installed or installed right ( Office 365, Adobe, VPN software, etc).

If the agent isn’t right you delete from ADUC and SCCM and start over..

We are lucky if Software Center works,... some times.

Published software packages break on a regular basis, aren’t available to install due to GPO, and you can’t run it ( that my group has found) in an elevated state for applications the user doesn’t see; not all applications are published to everyone...

We use Intune for ~10k devices across a handful of countries and is working great for device and software deployment.

I agree with this. Intune is replacing SCCM functionality in the best way possible.

@obsolesce said in SCCM Queries:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sccm/develop/reference/core/clients/manage/sms_r_system-server-wmi-class

And I see many of the attributes I can include in a query there. So when a query is run, this class is generated, which populates itself with the relevant data from the database, then the query selects the necessary data from this on-the-fly generated class. Does that seem right?

@eddiejennings said in System center configuration manager and SQL server:

For those who use SCCM, do you host the database on the same server as the SCCM application, or do you have SQL server as its own VM?

I am replacing SCCM in our test environment, and will be doing the same eventually in our production environment. The current one has SQL server host locally. But since were looking to start over, I figured it would be worth weighing the pros and cons of keeping SQL Server local or having you be on the remote server.

In my last job, we ran SCCM for a while and we had everything on one VM. (Small set up with ~200 PCs). It ran OK.

I'd suggest keeping it to one host for your test environment, and separating them out for your production setup.

@BBigford said:

I've been looking for the GUID entries in SCCM 2012 but have been unable to find them. When a machine is reimaged by SCCM, I was under the impression that it does indeed log the machines entry in SCCM. Google has evaded me... do you know where they get stored at in 2012?

2012 is different to 2007 in that you don't need to go hunting for the GUID unless you are digging through the database.

That being said...

If you go to Assets and Compliance --> Overview --> Devices, you can add the GUID column by right clicking any of the column titles and selecting ID. Deleting the device from here also deletes it from the database.