Administration overview and hierarchy configuration

- [Instructor] Let's do an overview of the system center configuration manager administration section. You can see it in your lower left corner. From here we're going to take a look at the different sections by going to the overview and scrolling down. And we're going to discuss each of these different areas, such as migration, security, client settings, site configuration, cloud services, and hierarchy configuration. Let's start in this video with the hierarchy configuration.

We spent some time in this area when we were creating our discovery methods and boundary groups and boundaries. Let's go ahead and do an overview of these different sections. First things under discovery method, we see the active directory forest group, etc. That shows us the different ways we can find computers. As you can see, we've enabled several of these but not all of them. If we only want to discover devices, then we can enable network discovery and system discovery.

If we want to also enable the ability to look for users, then we go do active directory user discovery as well. If we have many different forests, we can also go to active directory forest discovery, and if we want to affect groups inside our active directory rather than just individuals, we can go to our group discovery. No matter which ones you enable or disable, always make sure you have the heartbeat discovery turned on, that is the minimum that we need in order for system configuration to work properly.

The next section is the boundaries area. Boundaries allow us to specify the parameters of where system center configuration manager can search for users and devices. Earlier we set up the 19216815.0 subnet to look for the clients, in this case it was the devices. Then later I added the widget.internal so it would look for all the different users as well.

And you can see the group count for each of these is set to one, that doesn't mean it found just one device or one user, it just looked from one specific area. The next area that we configured was the boundary groups. We created one boundary group in an earlier video. And creating boundary groups allows us to assign the boundaries we already created to an area. So if we take this particular boundary group, and we'll just call it test, and then we'll click the add button, we can add our widget.internal active directory to that and then click okay.

If we go back to our boundaries, we can double click on widget internal, go to boundary groups and we can see both the client group and the test group are added. When we're done with that, we can go ahead and choose remove and click okay. We can also delete unneeded boundary groups simply by right clicking and choosing delete. The next section is the exchange server connectors. If you have an exchange server on premises, or if you have it at office 365, then you can create a connector by clicking the add exchange server option.

Let's go ahead and add an exchange server. And in this particular case we're going to add a host to the exchange server which is office 365. If you have a local one, you can add the on premises option. And this is our website url we use to connect. Go ahead and click next. Now we want to specify the account to connect to the exchange server. Go ahead and click new account.

Now we'll enter our password and reenter. Click okay. Now this is the administrator account for our office 365 tenant. This will already need to be set up prior to adding this exchange server. We can also go ahead and tell it to default to look for any mobile devices in the exchange organization so we can manage those as well. And we've successfully added the exchange server. Having the exchange server also allows us to create alerts that can be sent to our inboxes.

So if you are an administrator and you like to have an alert sent to you when something goes wrong with SCCM, or if you have any other alert set up to tell you about any informational event that happened in configuration manager, then you can use this connector to provide that link between SCCM and your email. Let's take a look now at database replication. As you can see, we don't have any database replication set up because we don't have a secondary site, and we don't have sequel set up for replication.

We only have the single database. If you do add another sequel server or another site, then you can add replication at that time. With file replication, we can replicate files between databases rather than the entire database. And you can simply do that by creating the file replication route. Now you'll need a second site in order to create this, and as you can see we just have the one. We can at least use part of the wizard just to show how it is that you can set this up. And then you can replicate files between multiple sites.

Let's take a look now at our active directory forests. There is a single forest listed because this particular configuration manager is a member of the widget.internal active directory domain. We can double click on that domain and we can make a few changes such as discovery sites and subnets in the forest, which we set up earlier. We can also use a specific account if we don't want to use the computer account of the site server. This may happen if you have more than one administrator with different rights.

We can also go to publishing as well and see that it's published to specific sites of which we only have the one PDX-Portland. And if you have more than one domain or server you can also specify that as well. That highlights the various areas of the hierarchy configuration and an overview of the administration section in our system center configuration manager. In upcoming videos, we will also take a look at the cloud services, site configuration and other areas as well.