SCE, SCCM, SCOM - Which? What? and How?

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Hopefully you fine people can put me out of my misery (or atleast end my confusion) as relates to SCE and SCCM/SCOM.

What we have:

We have 46 servers and approximately 170 client PC's. The servers are running a mix from 2000 to 2008 R2, the clients XP with a small sprinkling of Win 7 (professional or Enterprise)

One of the servers (Athena) has had a fresh build of 2008 R1 and SCE 2010 installed.

The company is split into 7 physical sites with the larger of the satalite offices linked with fibre connections, the smaller ones with SDSL or ADSL.

Each site has a repoistory of our deployment packages held in the DFS.

What we need it to do:

The main reason we are looking at this is the yearly struggle we have with trying to get AutoCAD to deploy via group policy and pulling from the DFS. To say this is less easy than it sounds would be an understatment and normally takes about a month to complete (including testing time). SCE and SCCM are both listed as approved deployment methods for AutoCAD and Office 2010 (which we have to deploy next year) so we are taking a look. However in our attempts so far to create deployment packages, SCE is storing them locally, and while this is fine for the head office, pulling 4gb deployment pacakges across the WAN links is not really an acceptable solution: so I ask you is there anyway I can create respoitories in the satalite offices so they can pull this stuff locally?

 

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SCE is a mix of functionality that's offered in SCOM, SCCM and also SCVMM, where it differs (and the reason it's not really used at the Enterprise level) is that it's limited to the amount of servers it can be deployed to.

It used to be that you could only manage a max of 30 servers but with SCE 2010 you can now manage 50 servers, as you're approaching that limit you do need to be aware of that.

As far as distributing the software, you need to create Branch Distribution Points (BDP's) on each of the remote servers, you 'can' install this role onto a workstation but you would be limited to 10 concurrent connections if you did it to a workstation so my recommendation would be to install it to a server in each of the locations.

I would also suggest that if you do implement a BDP in each site that you either configure BITS transfer per site or you use a USB drive and visit each site to update the servers manually.

 

Thanks Simon, how do I create these branch deployment points? Is it a requirement to install the software directy to the server or does it function like a repository?

Been going round in circles with this all day.

 

I've actually setup SCCM in my company it does the trick well. For us it was more about deploying computer images to workstations, etc... Like Simon pointed out, I setup Branch Distribution Points (basically a repository) and copied all my deployment packages over. Now I just create a task sequence and deploy the applications and OS to remote locations.

 

I don't know how to do it in SCE but in SCCM I would go to Site Systems and Install the DP role to a new server.
You would need to have a look more into how SCE does it (I only work on SCCM and not SCE).

 

Thanks for the responses guys - Looks like it will have to be SCCM. Its a shame as I really liked the reporting functions but i dont know if we can stretch to the Ops manager as well.