Planning and Deploying System Center 2012 Configuration Manager — Lesson 1: Configuration Manager Architecture and Deployment Planning

Learning Objectives

• Explain sites, hierarchy, roles, boundaries, discovery, collections, and infrastructure dependencies
• Assess organizational scale, network topology, security, client platforms, and deployment requirements
• Plan primary sites, distribution points, management points, databases, and high availability

Detailed Topics

• Explain sites: Explain sites, hierarchy, roles, boundaries, discovery, collections, and infrastructure dependencies
• Assess organizational scale: Assess organizational scale, network topology, security, client platforms, and deployment requirements
• Plan primary sites: Plan primary sites, distribution points, management points, databases, and high availability

Guided Demonstration

1. Review the requirement, environment, dependencies, roles, risks, and expected outcome.
2. Demonstrate the relevant configuration, analysis, code, or administration workflow step by step.
3. Capture settings, outputs, logs, screenshots, calculations, or test evidence.
4. Compare the observed result with the stated acceptance criteria.

Hands-On Activity

Create a Configuration Manager hierarchy and site-system deployment plan.

• Document assumptions and the planned sequence before making changes.
• Complete the activity and preserve evidence of normal and exception behavior.
• Record issues, corrective actions, and reusable operational or development notes.

Troubleshooting Focus

• Separate symptoms from causes and collect evidence before applying a fix.
• Check configuration, permissions, data, dependencies, capacity, connectivity, and recent changes.
• Validate rollback, recovery, support ownership, and user or business impact.

Validation Checklist

• The requirement and expected outcome are clear.
• The selected configuration, design, query, code, or process is documented.
• Normal, boundary, failure, security, and operational conditions are reviewed.
• The result is supported by evidence and the next improvement is prioritized.

Lesson Outcome

Learners can explain and apply Configuration Manager Architecture and Deployment Planning in a realistic scenario and validate the result with documented evidence.