How to Enable Site Server High Availability in SCCM

hi my name is Justin shelf I'm the founder and engineering lead at patch my PC we develop a third-party patch management solution that integrates in a Microsoft configuration manager prior to my current role a is also a premier field engineer at Microsoft supporting config manager in this video I'm really talking about the high availability feature of the site server that was introduced in config manager 1806 current branch so first thing I want to cover is what the site server actually does to understand if it would make sense in your environment for you to make it high availability so the first thing if we look over here and understanding the impacts of a site server failure so let's take a quick look at this now the biggest thing that I could see why most customers may want a backup site server in passive mode is because your clients communicate with client facing site system roles such as your management point your software update point etc but those site systems they communicate any of the client data like hardware inventory software inventory software update compliance details those management points would all send that data up to your site server which is what actually processes any changes into the database so that's probably one of the key components that I think of of why you might want to have high availability because let's say for example your clients have software update deployments you would never know if that compliance date ever changed even if those clients had already got policy because the state messages that get sent up to your MP would never get processed into your database if the site server ever went down a few other things it also runs our sight component manager which would install any remote site systems it also manages your content library which is how any of the content that you're distributing goes out to your remote dps so anything like that would be completely offline if the site server went down so that's kind of the overview of what I think of when the when we're talking about kind of the site server I'll also include some links here that goes into a few more scenarios of what would happen if your site server went down as well but that's kind of the key thing I think of so next let's kind of review what high-availability means with in 1806 and some of the key components of it so within 1806 it only supported a primary stand-alone primary site actually in 1810 that's what's changed it now can be added to a primary site within a hierarchy within your calves or child primary 1/p prerequisite here is you do need to use a remote content library right so that kind of makes sense because your site server stores your content library and that's where it references any of the source packages and content that you're have within your site and that's where it comes from when it distributes that through remote dps so if you were to have an active and a passive site server for high availability it makes sense that you would have to remove or or yeah for put that content library on a remote location since you would have two servers that could potentially access that now within the 18:10 build so let me just jump over here to the 1810 release nodes there were some pretty big improvements here so the first one being that in order for your site server to really have any type of you know high availability we still need access to the database so you would either need to use a remote sequel server database that has like a cluster or some type of high availability or with 1810 they added a the ability for you to cluster using sequel always-on so you could potentially have always-on availability groups within sequel on your active site server and in the passive one that you're going to use so in the event that the active site server went down you could use it would automatically fell over using sequel always on to your passive server so that was introduced in 1810 so that could potentially reduce the what you would have had to do with 1806 where you would require a remote sequel server you can now use sequel always on in that cluster and you could have it running on both of your site servers instead of having it remote okay so that was the key things I think I wanted to cover before we jump right in so I want to give you an overview of kind of how my site set up so we understand what we're going to be today now in my scenario because sequel always-on is is pretty complex and it would take a little bit of time probably its own video to set up I'm actually gonna be hosting my site database on a remote site system in this lab now I will include a reference link to some different videos as well as some microsoft technet articles that cover setting up sequel always-on so if you wanted to use your site database on your site servers you could have sequel always-on instead of using a remote database like I'm doing in this scenario and then next we have to client facing site system site systems these are both running mp's dps and subs right so if you wanted to have high availability for your client facing site systems you would want to make sure you have at least two instances of management point DP and software update point and lastly we have our current site server so one thing I do want to cover the reason that we have to have these two remote site systems is that within high availability you cannot run the distribution point role on your site server that's configured for high availability right so here is the documentation for that so when we're using high availability the site server cannot have the DP role so in that scenario in order to have high availability of our clients that's why we needed those two remote site systems that are running our DP since the DP couldn't be on the site server I also put the management point in distribution point I'm sorry software update point remote in that scenario so keep an eye out for this it sounded like when I was at a few different user groups that David James was that they wanted to make this at some point where you could basically have high availability on only two site servers including client facing site system roles so in the future keep an eye maybe they will have an option where you can have your remote content library for the site and maybe an additional one for the actual distribution point that's running on those two site servers but for now you would have to have a remote site system for your distribution point since when we configure our site server for high availability we can have the DP roll on it all right so that looks good I think for kind of covering the basics I'm just zoom out of here now what we're going to do is we are going to add a additional site server it's going to be named exactly the same except instead of one it's going to be two for the host name so the way that I had this configured if you followed my initial configuration and installation video if we look at Active Directory we have a security group that contains all of our site servers within SCCM so what I'm going to do is go ahead and add my new site server so here we go that's our current one we'll go ahead and add our next one here all right so there's the one that we're gonna add so I'm gonna go ahead and add this to the security group by doing that that's going to give my new site server permissions to my system management container within Active Directory alright so if we go and look at that this was initially configured when we did our site installation so in the event that we fell over our site server the new computer account will have all the permissions that's needed in order to actually write to the system management container of AD so that just makes it a little easier than trying to manage computer accounts directly for this type of security that's also going to make it easier for giving our local admin rights to the different computers that our site servers so that they can perform the installations so that looks good now now that I added that server to the group we can see that we're now logged into it I'm just going to go ahead and reboot this so it obtains that new membership within the security group that we added this object to all right so this new site server that we're going to install has now been rebooted after we added it to the ad security group the next thing that we have to validate is that the new site servers computer account has full sis admin rights to the sequel server as well as local admin rights to the sequel database machine so in our case this is running on a remote database so if I log in to that sequel server first we'll make sure that we have local Ministry of Rights on the actual box in order to be able to install the site server it will check that you have local admin rights on your remote sequel server in this instance so if I look at my local administrators we can actually see that we've already gave the computer security group account of all our site servers local admin rights on sequel now if you wanted to you could of course add the computer object directly like we see here for our primary site server next thing we do also need sysadmin rights to sequel so if we look at our sequel logins we can see let's take a look at what we have going on here so in our case the computer object of the initial site server does have this admin rights so we could either directly add the computer account or we could add that security group to have rights to sequel so if we come over here we can look at groups under locations we need to look at our ad site and we'll go ahead and find that security group for our site servers now within here we could go ahead and give that Syst admin rights that's a requirement when we perform our installation the site server does need to have sis admin rights on sequel now if you didn't want to use the security group you could simply go to new login you could do domain name back slash computer name and then put a dollar sign at the end so I believe I type that right so a domain name backslash computer name of your new site server and then dollar sign to let it know it's a computer object give that sis admin rights and then go ahead and click OK and that's how you would add the computer account directly if you didn't use a security group for your site server computer accounts all right so that should be good with the sequel permissions that we have to assign to that new computer account next thing that we're gonna go ahead and do is log log back on to our computer that's going to be our new site server and we need to install some of their prerequisites that we need within our site server installation so the first thing that we need is microsoft.net 3.5 so we're gonna just use the built in server manager and install this so this is gonna be under features microsoft.net 3 5 since we're all in server 2019 or if it was 2012 or 2016 we do need to provide the path if you don't have internet access to the adat net installation file so this is just my installation ISO and then in the sxs folder we have our component here for dotnet on demand so I'm going to copy this path and we're going to say we're gonna get the source files from that installation folder to install net 3 5 so we'll wait for that to complete all right so dotnet 3.5 is now installed so that looks good so let me close out of that the next thing where I do is go ahead and open a PowerShell command prompt and we need to install wsus on our site server now if you're not running your software update point on your site server you don't have to perform the full installation of wsus you only need the wsus api's so that your site server can connect into any remote software update point and it has the necessary wsus api's so it looks like it over wrote that command while it's installing but I'll come back and show you the actual command line that we ran to install only the API piece of W sauce so we don't have to go through and do the database or anything like that if you're not running yourself update point on your site servers alright that looks good so the command line that we ran here we can see just installed windows feature - name and then Update Services - API that's only going to install the API piece of this so now for example if I ran the command let's come back over here there we go so now if we do the get windows feature update services we can only see that you know we have the API components installed here we don't have any of the sequel or wit components for the actual database only those ap is that we need in order to configure an in remote software update point now the next thing that we need to install is remote differential compression so I'm going to go ahead and install that windows feature here we look at that command line it's just install windows feature our DC is going to be the component that we need for that alright so that looks good now since config manager can't run the distribution point on the site server currently in 1810 and high availability there's not really a need to install IAS but I will include the command line template just in case that ever changes where you can install the distribution point on your site server in a high availability scenario but for this scenario we don't need is for that but we do need the Windows 10 80k so I'm going to install the Windows 10 18:09 80k so we have the main 80k setup so let me go ahead and run that we'll just leave the default for the install and what we need is our deployment tools and our you SMT so just like if you were doing a clean installation of a site server you do need you SMT as well as the deployment tools so we've got both of those selected and we'll go ahead and choose to install so that's looking good now with the 18:09 version of the ADK they did split out the main 80k and then they split windows PE outside of that so we do have a separate install that we need for winpe because that's also one of the prereqs and i'll of course include a download link in the description where you can get each of these ATK's alright so that looks good we'll go ahead and launch the winpe ADK we'll leave the defaults and then choose to install when PE and go ahead and install that and then okay alright so when PE is now installed next thing that we want to do is make sure that our current site server is going to have access to this new site server so under computer management we're gonna go ahead and give that site server security group that contains all of our site servers so that would include our current one as well as this computer account that we're on here local administrator rights so in our case we're gonna go ahead and do sec m underscore site and go ahead and add that to the local admins group now if you wanted to add the other site server directly you could add the computer account there and you would also want to make sure that either the security group and the computer account for your new site servers also local admin rights on your current site server to ensure that they can connect to each other when they're performing installations or failing over so we'll go ahead and apply that and choose ok so I think that covers most of the prereqs now since we did install dotnet and some other server features I mean go ahead and run a reboot of this machine because when we perform the new site server installation one of the prerequisites will be a pending restart to make sure that there isn't one all right so we are back on our primary site server so this is currently our site server this one here now in order for us to actually be able to install our content library make it remote you will not have this managed content library option clickable unless you've already removed the distribution point role from your current site server so in my case I've already removed the distribution point role from the site server so we can see that it does currently contain that if you did have the DP role on your current site server you would not be able to choose the option under your site to manage the content library now if your content library is not set to a remote UNC path you also will not be able to install a passive site server so uh so when we come over here to manage we can see our current one is local now we want to make this remote so I'm going to go ahead and jump over to one of our remote machines here and I've already created a folder called content library so within here I'm going to go ahead and share this out I'm gonna give everybody full control for sharing permissions right so that looks good and within that share I need to make sure that my computer accounts have full access to this so I can see that the computer account for the security groups that contain them has full control over this folder that's going to ensure that your site servers have NTFS rights to that share that we did for our content library now if you're doing the computer account directly you could of course come in here add a new object add computers here and then you could add that new site server SC cm3 server to we could add that directly and we need to make sure that that has full control otherwise it would not be able to move that to our remote share here alright so that looks good so let's go back to our site server and let's just validate that we can browse out to that remote share path that we're using here there we go so content library now one thing that you'll notice if we tried to add this directly using the root share folder it's not going to allow that and so we do need to make a subfolder within that share so I'm going to call this content library site pr3 for our site code so we'll go ahead and copy that path and we'll go ahead and choose to move our content library from our local path on our site server to that remote unc path now to monitor this if you look at your logs in your site server and go ahead and open the distant manager log this is going to show the component that's going to actually handle the move of that content so here we can see that detected the change we can see the current source folder and then here in a second we'll see this kick in and then it's going to start moving the content all right so we can see that's currently in the process of moving the files so if we come back to our console and refresh our site you can also see the current content move status over here in the content library as well so now if we were to browse out to that UNC path we can now see that it's starting to put some of our content library files in migrating them over there so for example if we were to look at the current local path we can see that it has a similar structure so it's starting to move that and we'll just wait for that to complete in my lab I don't have that many packages but depending on the size of how many packages that you have within your site this could obviously take quite some time to actually move all those files over to that remote UNC path all right so it looks like our content library move completed based on the log file now one thing I do want to call out is that my current site server we can see here is running Windows Server 2016 now the server that you set up for your passive site server does not have to be the exact same operating system as long as is a supported operating system for the current version that you have of SS CCM so if we take a look we're actually gonna be running our passive site server that we install on Windows Server 2019 and we can see that this is now supported in 1810 which is the version that we're going to be using all right so that looks good so if we come back in here and do a refresh we can now see that our content library was moved we can see that the new location is pointing to that UNC path so at this point I think we've really done most of the prerequisites that we need in order to be ready to install our site server in passive mode so coming back to my servers and site system roles I'm going to go ahead and choose to create a new site system server this is going to be where we point out to our new site server that we're going to be adding for passive mode so if we go ahead and type in that computer name we're going to go ahead and select that number two we're going to add it for this site here move that over since we've already gave the computer account permissions of our current site server that should of course work fine to use our computer account to perform the installation so we're do next here and this is where we want to choose the option to install the site server in passive mode so as long as you move your content library and you installed all the prerequisites like the ad KS and the different features we should be able to install this successfully so we'll go ahead and do next here and then finally what we can do here is choose the installation on our remote computer that we want to install config manager on - for our site server so if I take a look at my current config manager site it's currently installed in d microsoft configuration manager so if we look at this structure we can see that I currently have three different discs here right so if we look at our new one it's got a quite similar setup so jumping over to that new computer that we're going to be using we can see we've got all the same directories but what I'm going to do is go ahead and create our installation directory that we're going to do on the D Drive so we're going to have the same installation path as our current site server as well so I'll go ahead and copy that path and come back to my current site server and we're going to say that we want to install config manager on our remote machine to that d microsoft configuration manager folder we're going to leave the option to copy installation files from our current active site server and that's going to be what's used to perform that installation we'll choose next here and then we'll choose next here we'll go ahead and close this now there is a very good monitoring piece that shows the installation status so under monitoring if you click on your site server status and if you go ahead and select the one that you just added and click on show status this is where we're gonna see all the prerequisite checks that are going on as well as the installation so just will refresh this make sure they didn't miss anything here there we go it looks like most of the checks are done now if you want to actually see the log file that's performing these checks if we come back to our site server logs and look at the fell over manager dot log this is where it's gonna see it analyzing the remote server and connecting into it to perform all the checks so if you did have something that fell doubt and you want it more verbose logging you could check out that log file here to see all these different checks taking place all right so there we go we just refreshed it looks like all the prerequisites checked out so that's gonna include things like local admin rights on that remote machine that we've added through the groups make sure that we have sequels to admin right so we already did that make sure it's to support it os pending restart so there's why we performed that restart here's our remote differential compression component here's our wind PE components that we installed as well as the wsus api's that we needed for that as well so everything looks good there if we jump over to the preparation we can see things happening where it's copying the installation files to that remote site server that we're gonna be adding so let's go ahead and jump over there and see if we've actually got anything showing up yet looks like it's still generating the package on our current primary site so we can see that's creating that compressed packet so I'll pause a few minutes and wait for us to see some stuff actually happening on that remote machine all right so let's refresh here so jumping over to our new site server that we're adding in passive mode the first thing that we can look is we should have a log file in the root of C called SM STS service this is where it's gonna see if your computer account has permissions to sequel so we can see that it does and we've returned code one jumping back to the D Drive which is where the installation is going to take place there once the install starts we should see this SMS bootstrap and that's gonna start extracting that package that was sent over from the primary site server to this drive that we're installing to so for example if we look at this temp folder we can see this is the the setup files that were copied over and at this point it's gonna start performing some installations of the site so here we go we can see that's already started performing some installs let's see if the there we go so back on our primary we can see that the installation status is now set to installing files so if we come back to this machine we can see the installation taken place so we can close this bootstrap now that we see that it extracted the package and started the installation file here so here's the actual install command that's being run to install our site but the actual core installation log should be back on the C Drive and then config manager setup dot log so this is where we're gonna actually see all the different files and folders getting installed for our site server so we can see all these files getting copied into place so this will take a few minutes I'll go ahead and pause it while this completes alright so it looks like the core configuration is now completed for that setup now once the initial configuration and installation happens for that site server if we come back to our installation directory and look at our logs component within a few minutes you should see the site comp dot log so this is our site component manager this is gonna go and start installing additional components that correspond to our site server so we'll just kind of monitor this for a couple minutes and make sure things look good if we also refresh we can see that we are now on our post installation step which is installing the executive service which is then going to kick up site cop that's going to install all the additional components and threads that run under that SMS executive service alright so that site comp log on our new passive site server seems to have completed and slowed down and we no longer have components installing if we do a refresh we can now see that our post installation is completely done so at this point we should be good to go the promotion would not happen unless your site server felled over or you manually felt it over so at this point we're good to go it should show install to pre refresh here and we now have our active site server and our passive site server listed here alright now the next thing if we go look at our Docs we do need to install our provider one thing here I will mention this if you do have like a guide that you want a topic that you want covered probably the best way I do post different polls out when I'm thinking of new topics based on your feedback and usually have a vote in a poll on Twitter and that's a good place if you did want to follow that if you want any type of feedback and try to you know pick topics for what I'm going to cover next but one thing I wanted to cover here in the documentation is once we add our new passive site server by default based on the Doc's it says that you might want to install the SMS provider role so that you have at least two providers generally the provider is installed on on your site server so in our case if we come back to our console and look back at our site system roles we can see that my primary let me select that there we go we can see that the primary server one that is our active site server also has our SMS provider on it now in the event that site server one went down and the new one got promoted we would want to make sure that we still have a provider that we can connect to which is what our console uses to interface with the database so you know we'd recommend probably in that second provider on that passive site server so that you could still connect now one thing that I did notice in 1810 if we look back at our log files on our passive site server it does appear to install the SMS provider so we can see the provider log here and even if we went into our console on our primary site server and if we went to connect to the site we can see that I am in fact pointing to my passive site server and if we go ahead and click connect we can see that it does in fact connect to the site if we come back to our log file on our passive we can see that the provider is talking to the database so in 1810 it does appear that it installs the provider but what's interesting here is that if we look at it it doesn't actually register the provider in here so what I would recommend in this scenario even if it does appear to be running the provider I've noticed if we come back into our setup we can modify the provider configuration and reinstall it on our passive site server and then it will appear in here correctly all right so what we'll do back on our active site server we're gonna come into our config manager setup and go ahead and launch this we'll choose next here we're gonna choose the option to perform site maintenance or reset and do next here we're gonna choose this option to modify the SMS provider configuration and we can see that it thinks it only has one even though it appears that it is in fact running on the second one so what we're gonna do is go ahead and paste in that secondary passive site server and choose next here alright so here we go and what's even interesting is that we can see here in our setup file we it thinks or you know it can see that it already has the provider on here right so it seems like it does install I don't know if this is possibly a bug in 1810 based on the documentation that that I pulled up it seemed like that it would not automatically install the provider on the passive site server it appears that it kind of does in 1810 like you can connect to it but it doesn't appear to register properly so possibly a bug in 1810 but we're gonna go ahead and choose to reinstall the provider on this site and we'll go ahead and view this log file and this will take a few minutes to kind of go through connect to our remote passive site server and go ahead and get the provider installed all right so it looks like the provider was now installed on our server so let's go ahead and open the console and see how things look alright so looking here now so now we can see that our primary active site server now has four components like you would expect and now that new one that we just added the provider on has the same exact number we can see the provider is now registered and of course if we look at our console let's just take a look here we should be able to connect to the provider on our active site server so we'll go ahead and connect verify that looks good and then we should also be able to connect to the provider on our passive server that would facilitate all the requests in the scenario that are active SMS provider and site server went down alright so it looks like we are now in a good configuration we have our high availability with our active and passive site server now there's basically two ways that a server can go from past have to actively you can promote it so if you wanted to for instance change your passive server to become the active and your current active one go to passive that could be a scenario where maybe you want to migrate your site server to a new computer you know maybe update the OS if you didn't want to do an in-place upgrade that could be a scenario where you want to manually fill it over or there's also a unplanned fell over what happens with that is if the active server is unavailable for 30 minutes it should automatically fell over now just to show you where you would go if you did want to perform a manual fell over if you look at your site and then look under the nodes here this is where we can see our current active and passive site server so look at that so we can currently see that the server - one is active and server - two is passive so if you wanted to promote one to active manually you could go ahead and manually initiate that promotion directly here you can then monitor that in the monitoring node the same place that we went for the installation so under here if you were promoting it you could go to show status and it would show the promotion here now what I'm going to do for this scenario is we're going to go ahead and just power the current active server down and then we'll just kind of monitor to see what happens to see if the unplanned fell over kicks in alright so now we're back on our passive server one thing I do want to go ahead and get knocked out of the way is installing our console so by default the console would not get installed on that passive site server I don't have any clients with the console installed so I'm going to go ahead and choose to install the console in my case on this passive server I'm going to go ahead and point to the provider by default for our passive site server that we installed that provider on so we'll go ahead and do next and install the console all right so let's go ahead and open that console up alright so this looks good so like you would expect we should still have connectivity since our remote database is still online now in the event that you were using sequel always on when the sequel went offline for that site server for the first one that was active you know your connectivity to the database should still be active with that sequel always-on connection if you installed that on the passive site server so you should still essentially have database access your provider should still be able to contact that database from that secondary passive server that is now should be promoted here in a few minutes I would think so connectivity all looks good so we'll just wait and see if that kicks in here alright so we still haven't been offline 30 minutes yet but I do want to cover this point here that says during the 30-minute wait period when there's no active site server clients still communicate with their client facing roles such as MP software update points etc but none of that will get processed into the database so what I did in this example is I went ahead and kicked off some software update scans as well as some inventory scans and we can see that the they've been forwarded up to their management point if we look at our software update scan we can see that any of the state changes went to our management point so over on our management point if we look at the State message inbox which will be where any of the software update compliance changes are currently staged since they can't be processed because there's no site server just to kind of show you what that looks like you know we can see details about our software update state we can see this is the machine that did the scan etc and you can get details about when they're in that pending state this is why you might want to have that passive one because if your site server is down for a long period of time you would never be able to get any type of compliance changes for updates inventory and things like that so once the site server kind of takes over the management point should detect that and start talking to the new one that gets promoted and we should see these files start to process all right so after waiting about 45 minutes or so and noticing that nothing happened with regards to failing over I realized that I quickly glanced over and the unplanned fell over I kind of misread that so when you want to promote the site server in the current build of 1810 that's always going to be a manual action that you have to perform within the console right so if we look at the promotion you're gonna have to perform that in the console so here's the process so the section here about a unplanned fell over what that means is that if you go into your console and switch over a passive server to become active because the active one went offline in that scenario the passive server is going to try to contact the current active site server for up to 30 minutes so that it can gracefully change over to the passive and active in this scenario that the active site server was completely offline and you can empower it up that's where after 30 minutes it will forcefully upgrade itself to the active server so good thing I wouldn't kind of reread that or I'd be kind of waiting and looking at that log realizing that nothing's actually happening so in this scenario what we're gonna do I did power back on server one just so we don't have to wait those additional 30 minutes but you know if you did perform this fell over operation and the original active site server was offline that's where it could take up to 30 minutes for it to actually force the upgrade to become active so back on our site back where we were looking in order to actually fill this over we're gonna go ahead and say that we want to make site server to our active site server so we'll go ahead and click YES on that and at this point if we come back here so we're currently running the console from our passive server so if we go ahead and open up that fell over manager log we'll see here in a few minutes that it's going to start notifying us of the fellow so there we go so it's starting to notify the server that we want to perform a switch to make this one active so if we come back to our state server we look at our current passive one we can see that it's now promoting this so if we go ahead and look at our installation status this is where we can see what's going on during the promotion so I'll pause this for a few minutes while this kind of starts the promotion of our passive to active all right so we are currently on our now active site server so we can see the promotion all went successfully that just completed now if we take a look at our site comp log on that new active server what we're gonna see is it is gonna install some additional component that previously would not have been on the passive server so we're going to look site cop we're gonna see some additional components and log files getting installed here we're also gonna see that it's going to start putting more inboxes here to start processing our client inventory and things that come through our inboxes alright so I probably wait about 10 15 minutes to wait for all the different components to install on this site server that's now active so you know we went through it connected once it installed all the components it went out and connected to all the remote site systems to tell them that hey this is now the active site server and then if I look at my Hardware inventory log which is the data loader that log on this new site server we can see of course all those Hardware inventory files getting processed from our clients so at this point things are looking good this site server 2 is now our primary site server and it's now active so at that point we've basically felled it over if you ever wanted to switch back that would be essentially the same process where we go to sites and then nodes and then you could simply promote the now passive server back to active if you ever had to switch back now if you ever did this so you could basically switch to a new site server this could potentially be an option for that if you didn't want to do a backup and recovery so let's say that you know maybe this new 20:19 server is what we wanted for our site server if you ever wanted to get rid of the passive one that was our old active server you could simply right-click and remove the site server and then get rid of that and then you could potentially add a new server as your passive one if you wanted to make them both server 2019 for example so I think that's all I had for having an active and passive site server and how you would perform that fell over in the scenario that you had to promote one now there were some interesting topics that David James the director of engineering was bringing up at MMS as well as some of the different user group tours that could be like in a future current branch they might make a scenario where you can have multiple active site servers to potentially offload the processing of things like state messages Hardware inventory thing like that so keep an eye out the high-availability feature could get even more interesting where you could possibly have multiple site servers to help offload processing of client you know client file is coming in from your site systems like your MPs and DPS and subs I hope this video was helpful and thank you for watching

Channel: Patch My PC

Views: 11,181

Keywords: Configuration Manager Site Server, Site Server, SCCM Site Server, Multiple Site Servers, SCCM Site Server High Availibility, SCCM High Availibility, ConfigMgr HA, SCCM HA, ConfigMgr Site Server, SCCM 1806, SCCM 1810, Site server high availability in Configuration Manager, site server in passive mode, site server in active mode, Site server promotion, Site server promotion sccm, High availability options for SCCM

Id: PsHsBseqkD0

Length: 44min 13sec (2653 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 07 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/PatchMyPCTeam]

Overview

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In this video guide, we will be covering how to configure site server high availability in Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager Current Branch. We will cover the prerequisites to install a passive site server, how to perform the installation, and how to fail over to the passive server. - Justin Chalfant

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Topics in Video

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• Review Basic’s of the Site Server and what actions it performs and impacts of it being down – https://youtu.be/PsHsBseqkD0?t=27
• Basic’s of High Availability of the Site Server – https://youtu.be/PsHsBseqkD0?t=134
• Review the lab setup and the current site server and site systems in the environment – https://youtu.be/PsHsBseqkD0?t=267
• Add the computer account of the new Passive site server to the Site Servers AD Security Group so it has permissions to the Systems Management container – https://youtu.be/PsHsBseqkD0?t=430
• Add the Computer Account or Security Group of the new passive site server to the Local Admins on the SQL Server and SysAdmin rights to the SQL Instance – https://youtu.be/PsHsBseqkD0?t=518
• Install .NET 3.5 SP1 on the new passive site server – https://youtu.be/PsHsBseqkD0?t=669
• Install WSUS (API’s) on the new passive site server – https://youtu.be/PsHsBseqkD0?t=728
  • Install-WindowsFeature -Name UpdateServices-API
  • Get-WindowsFeature -Name UpdateServices\*
• Install Remote Differential Compression role – https://youtu.be/PsHsBseqkD0?t=815
  • Install-WindowsFeature RDC
• Install the Windows 10 ADK (WinPE, Deployment Tools, and USMT) – https://youtu.be/PsHsBseqkD0?t=860
• Add Site Servers AD Security Group that contains Site Server Computer Accounts to Local Administrators on the new passive site server – https://youtu.be/PsHsBseqkD0?t=933
• Move ContentLibrary from a local path on the active site server to a remote network share – https://youtu.be/PsHsBseqkD0?t=1009
• Go through the wizard in the console to add a new “Site System Server” and choose the “Site server in passive mode” – https://youtu.be/PsHsBseqkD0?t=1309
• Review the site server prerequisites check in the “Site Server Status” node in the console – https://youtu.be/PsHsBseqkD0?t=1450
• Review C:\ConfigMgrSetup.log on new passive site server once core setup is started – https://youtu.be/PsHsBseqkD0?t=1654
• After core setup is complete review sitecomp.log on passive site server to see components under SMS_EXECUTIVE getting registered – https://youtu.be/PsHsBseqkD0?t=1688
• Installing the SMS_Provider on the new passive site server so the console could still connect is the active site server goes down – https://youtu.be/PsHsBseqkD0?t=1778
• Review process to promote site server in passive mode to active mode – https://youtu.be/PsHsBseqkD0?t=2053

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[u/commbatboots]

I love this ever expanding series! Justin is The Man! I’ve learned so much SCCM wizardry from these videos.