Administering Microsoft SCCM and Cloud Services (70-703): Introduction and Installation

0:00Welcome, my friends, to 70-703, Administering SCCM in Cloud Services. My name's Garth Schulte. I'll be your host with the most as we take a journey through the ultimate Microsoft administration product known as SCCM. In this Nugget, we're going to take an extremely high-level overview of what SCCM is all about by answering those two common questions-- what is it? And what can it do? The answer to those questions is really simple. What is it? Everything. What can it do? Everything.

0:31And that's that. I hope this Nugget has been inform-- no. I'm just kidding. Seriously though, it would be a lot easier to answer the inverse of these questions. What isn't it? And what can't it do? Which is why I like to call it the ultimate, the grand-daddy, the grand poobah of Microsoft products when it comes to administering our infrastructure. It gives us the power to control, configure, manage, monitor, automate, and report on everything-- hardware, software, users and their devices from inside, and even outside, our environments.

1:02And that's literally just scratching the surface. Let's take a look at what SCCM can actually do for us by covering some of its primary features. One area that has always been a major thorn in every administrators side is delivering updates to all the devices in our enterprise. We're talking desktops, laptops, servers, and even mobile devices. SCCM can do this with relative ease. And it does so by utilizing and even extending the capabilities of an existing Windows server technology known as WSUS, Windows Server Update Services.

1:34And by the way, this is a theme that you're going to see throughout SCCM. It sits on top of many of the best Microsoft technologies, which is why it's considered a single, unified tool-- so whether it's WSUS for delivering updates, WDS, Windows Deployment Services, for delivering operating systems, or Internet Information Services in Intune for extending our administrative reach beyond the local area network. And I almost forgot about the biggest product of them all, of course, SQL Server, which is required as that's what SCCM uses to store all of its information.

2:07All right, back to our almost top-10 list here on what SCCM can do. Next up here, deliver applications-- imagine having the power to centrally and remotely deploy applications to all of your users' devices. Yeah, no problem for SCCM. Not only that, but it can optimize that delivery and give us the flexibility in how we want to deliver it. Do we want to deliver it and have it locally installed? Do we want to stream it through application virtualization or present it through something like Remote Desktop Services or Citrix XenApp? We can also use it to deploy operating systems to all the physical devices within reach.

2:41And again, we're talking everything here-- desktops, laptops, servers, and even mobile devices. Pretty much anything that can have an operating system on it, we can touch. And it does so, again, utilizing that existing technology I mentioned, WDS, Windows Deployment Services. We can also monitor, manage, and enforce policies for our users and their devices. When integrated with Microsoft Intune, we get some nice MDM capabilities that will allow us to target virtually any platform out there-- Windows, iOS, and Android. Another very powerful aspect of SCCM is having the ability to control and manage settings for all the devices in our environment to ensure that they stay in compliance with our policies.

3:21So we can configure a desired state for a device or groups of devices. And if they were to ever drift out of that state, we can either set it up so we are alerted immediately when that happens or to automatically put it back into its desired state. One of the more common features used in SCCM is inventorying all the hardware and software in your environment. Imagine having the ability to quickly look up what a machine has installed on it, and the resources available to it, and having the ability to do that for any machine in your environment. Another feature in the same category that they don't have listed here is known as Asset Intelligence.

3:57This will take all of that inventory data and turn it into extremely useful information so we can determine how often software is being used, which will impact our future decisions for buying new software, upgrading existing software, and licensing requirements for that software. Finally, SCCM has some pretty impressive reporting capabilities all because it sits on top of SSRS, SQL Server Reporting Services. It's loaded with built in reports that we can use to get real-time information on everything you see here-- updates, applications, users, devices, hardware and software inventory.

4:32Plus, we can use it to stay on top of our SCCM infrastructure, our sites and all the components within. And if there isn't a built-in report that suits your needs, you can always create your own custom report inside, or even outside, of SCCM. Because it uses SQL Server to host its database, we have access to all of that juicy information. So we're going to look at all of these features and much more as we begin our journey through 70-703 and SCCM. And you'll even have the opportunity to play with all of this stuff in our virtual lab environment, which we'll talk about along with the 70-703 exam details coming up next.

5:09That concludes our high-level overview of Systems Center Configuration Manager. I look forward to taking this journey with you. And, for real this time, I hope this has been informative for you. And I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00In this Nugget, we're going to take an overview of the 70-703 exam to get an idea of the content covered as well as the target audience, and we'll get familiar with our virtual lab environment and all the machines within, which is what you'll be using to follow along and get that crucial hands-on experience with SCCM. 70-703 is the most recent SCCM exam released in the first half of 2018. And very much like SCCM, this exam is a beast. It covers all of the primary components and features of the product.

0:33It consists of five objective domains beginning with configuring and maintaining a configuration management infrastructure. This is the biggest section of the exam. And it's really all about post-installation configuration and maintenance of your site hierarchy and all of those top level components. One thing you'll notice when going through these objectives, which I'll show you how to do here in a second, is there's nothing on installation. In fact, this exam begins right here post-installation. So we're going to throw a bunch of Nuggets in before we even get to these objectives.

1:07That will show you how to design an SCCM infrastructure, how to prepare your site for installation, and then, of course, walk through the installation process. From there, we'll cover these objective domains from the top down. So again, we'll look at infrastructure, how to manage inventory and applications, how to deploy operating systems, and how to extend the management scope beyond our network and beyond our internal devices to those that are external to our environment. Now one thing I want to mention is that, if you are new to SCCM and this exam, I would highly recommend going through this course in order, sequentially, from the top down, as these Nuggets and these labs will build on each other as we go.

1:47Also, if you are here for the exam, I highly recommend getting familiar with these objectives, which you can access using the link below that will take you right to the exam details for 70-703. Here's where that link will take you to the 70-703 Exam Details page, which contains all the relevant information you need about the exam. You can even schedule it here. But what I really wanted to show you is, if you head down here to the Skills Measured section, you will see those five objective domains. Here, you can expand them to see the objectives themselves and the content covered within.

2:19So take a minute to familiarize yourself with these objective domains and the objectives within. You may find some terms and technologies that you're familiar with as SCCM sits on top of a lot of existing Microsoft technologies such as SQL Server, Windows Server Update Services, and Windows Deployment Services, just to name a few. I should also mention that we have a Nugget and a lab for almost every single item on here for all of these objective domains. One more thing I want to show you here on the Exam Details page is towards the bottom, underneath, who should take this exam?

2:53The first section here is your target audience, which is Enterprise Desktop administrators. And the second section here contains your prerequisites. Candidates should have a strong understanding of networking, Active Directory Domain Services, Windows operating systems-- both server and desktop side of things-- and mobile device platforms. You should also have a basic understanding of PKI, Public Key Infrastructure, and, of course, it always helps to have some PowerShell skills and an understanding of existing Windows Server roles and services as, again, SCCM sits on top of quite a few technologies.

3:24Let's also get up to speed on our virtual lab environment. Almost every Nugget in this course will have a lab associated with it that you can use to, again, follow along and get that hands-on experience. If the Nugget you're watching has an associated lab, there will be a link on the course page that you can click. And just keep in mind, it does take a minute or two for that environment to fully spin up. The initial state of our virtual lab will look like this-- a simple five-machine network with three servers and two clients. As we progress through the course, we'll expand on this network.

3:56On the server side, we're going to have Windows Server 2016 Data Center Edition running on all of these. And on the client side, we have the latest build of Windows 10 Enterprise Edition. Most of our time spent in the beginning of this course will be on this monster SCCM-NUG server which has 32 gigs or RAM and two CPUs. Now, I did preinstall some of the core required components external to SCCM on this machine, such as SQL Server, Windows Server Update Services, WSUS, and IIS, Internet Information Services.

4:28Now, I just simply installed these and left them all in their default state. There are still some configurations we're going to need to make as we go through and many other prerequisites that will need to fulfill before we get to installing SCCM on this machine. Next up, we have FILE-NUG, which, as you may have guessed will primarily act as our file server. But this is also going to play the role of "whatever we need at that moment in time" server. So while we'll be placing most of SCCM site system roles on SCCM-NUG, if we ever need more-- another distribution point or another management point-- we'll be using FILE-NUG for that role.

5:03Next up, we have our domain controller DC-NUG, which will have Active Directory Domain Services on it as well as DNS. On the other side, we have CLIENT1- and CLIENT2-NUG, which will be playing the role of our desktop environment. So we'll be looking at how to configure, control, and manage these environments from SCCM. So this will give us a great starting point in the virtual lab. Again, we'll be extending this network as we progress through the course. For example, when we get to deploying operating systems over the network, we'll add CLIENT3-NUG into the mix.

5:35One thing I do want to mention is that we did associate a virtual lab with this Nugget to give you the opportunity to explore the machines that we'll be initially playing with and to get familiar with the lab UI. I hope that this has been informative for you. And I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00Designing an SCCM infrastructure involves planning out your site hierarchy and determining which site rules you'll need to install in the site servers in that hierarchy in order to support your requirements. In this Nugget, we're going to cover a good majority of the server and site system roles, and we'll also take a look at all the players involved in a site hierarchy, such as primary sites, secondary sites, and central administration sites. Let's start at the top here with site systems servers. These are otherwise known as the required roles for SCCM to function.

0:32And they're more labels than anything else. Whenever we install a primary site or install an optional role on a machine within our site, they will automatically acquire one of these labels. For example, whenever you install an optional SCCM role onto a machine in your hierarchy-- we'll look at those optional roles in a second-- that machine becomes a site system server. Whenever you run Configuration Manager Setup on a machine to install a primary site, that machine becomes a site server. Any machine containing the SMS Executive Service, which, by the way, is the host process for which all other SCCM components run under is known as a component server.

1:09The machine running an instance of SQL Server that will host our site database is known as the site database server. And finally, we have the SMS provider, which is a machine that hosts this component to facilitate communication between the Configuration Manager console and the site database. Next up, we have sight system roles, otherwise known as optional roles. And these are the components that will provide us with all of the features and functionality that were looking to support in our SCCM infrastructure. The first two here are management points and distribution points are arguably the most important as they provide the core functionality that we all know and love in SCCM.

1:45And they're also installed by default whenever you install a primary site. Management points provide clients with policy and service location information. And our clients also use management points to upload their configuration information to the site database. Distribution points are used to store and deliver content to client devices. And that content can be anything from application packages to operating system images. So these are the two site system roles that you'll want at a bare minimum to support the core features of SCCM.

2:16And you may want more than one of these in your environment to spread the load across your hierarchy. And that's all going to depend on the size of your network and the shape of your hierarchy. More on that down the road. We can further extend the functionality of our SCCM infrastructure by installing additional system roles on a machine or machines in our hierarchy. So for example, if you want to provide updates to your users and their devices, you'll need to install a software update point and also configure it to use Windows Server Update Services. If you want to create and manage reports, you'll need to install a reporting services point somewhere within your hierarchy and configure it to use an instance of SQL Server Reporting Services.

2:54And by the way, this is not a complete list of all the site system roles, although, these are the ones that are covered in 70-703. So we're going to look at all these individually, have a chance to play with them, and cover a couple of them that aren't on this list as well. So we'll save the rest of these for when we get there. Moving on, let's talk about site hierarchies. There are three kinds of sites that we can implement within a hierarchy. First up is the only required one, and that's a primary site. So you'll need at least one of these within your hierarchy, and it's used to support clients.

3:25Secondary sites are installed as children of primary sites. These secondary sites are used to extend the reach of your primary site to manage devices in locations that have a slower latent network connection between the secondary site and your primary site. And you also need a local instance of SQL Server installed on the secondary site servers as host a subset of the primary site's database used to reduce the amount of replication across those slow network links.

3:56The last piece of the puzzle here is a central administration site, which, when installed, sits at the very top of your hierarchy and is used to centrally administer, manage, and report on your primary sites. So a central administration site has no capability to manage users or devices. It's purely there to consolidate everything that happens at the primary sites, which become children of that central administration site. Now, how you design your SCCM infrastructure will depend on a couple of factors. The first and biggest one is the geographical makeup of your network.

4:28If you have a global infrastructure and IT teams at each location that want to manage their own slice of the pie. Then you can install primary sites at each location with a central administration site at HQ. This will give IT teams in those locations complete control over their portion of the infrastructure. On the flip side, if you didn't want to give them control, you could just install a primary site at HQ and get away with secondary sites and all of those remote locations. Another factor you'll need to take into consideration are scalability limits. Every component in SCCM has a scalability limit-- sites as well as site system roles.

5:03And they are set pretty high. But if you're dealing with hundreds of thousands to millions of devices, you may need more, more sites, or more site system roles to support that load. Thankfully, that's not going to be something we need to worry about here in our lab environment, as we are going to start here with a very simple hierarchy. We're going to bring up a single primary site, also known as a standalone site on a machine, which is going to contain all of the required server roles, including the site database server. And then we're going to install our optional roles onto this single machine as well-- management point and a distribution point.

5:36So at least to begin with, we're going to put everything on one machine, which is totally OK, even for small- to medium-sized real-world implementations. And those are the basics of designing an SCCM infrastructure. I hope this has been informative for you. And I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00SCCM has quite the laundry list of prerequisites, and that's mostly because, as we've seen, it relies on so many other Windows technologies, which also have their own prerequisites. So in this hands-on lab Nugget, we're going to look at the process and a couple of nifty tools that can help us prepare our site for SCCM installation. When your lab environment finishes loading up, you'll be planted right on SCCM-NUG. This is the machine where we'll be spending most of our time getting the prerequisites installed and ready to go. There is one thing we'll need to do in Active Directory as well, so we'll head over to our domain controller when the time comes.

0:33So we're going to start here by getting right into setup, and I actually have the binaries stored over on our file server. So if we open up File Explorer here and head over to file-nug and the software share within, here it is right here. We're going to be working with current branch 1802, which is the latest version of SCCM. So let's head into that directory, and let's attempt to walk through the installation wizard. Now, obviously, this isn't going to end well for us, because this machine isn't anywhere near prepared. But if we try to hit the Install button here, we'll get an error telling us that we need the .NET framework 3.5.

1:09So if we go and fix that and then come back and do it again, we'll get a different error, and then we'll continue to chase our tail all day long, which is why we have a great tool here in the installation media known as the Prereq Checker. You can find this tool underneath the SMSSETUP directory, BIN, X64, and within here, you can just start typing in prereq, and look at that. There it is. Now, I'm going to fire up an elevated command prompt and drag our Prereq Checker right onto it to get the path in there. Now, if you run this without any parameters, then obviously it's going to give us help here, and you can target remote machines.

1:42You can target specific components. If you want to just see what the requirements are for a management point or a distribution point or a central administration site or a primary site, you've got some flexibility here, as well as a secondary site in there. But what we're going to do is just run this against the local machine. So I'm going to recall my last command and pass in the local switch. This is going to pop open a GUI and run through all the prerequisites for a default installation, which is a primary site, a distribution point, and a management point. While we're waiting for the prereq check to finish up, I want to direct your attention to this incredibly handy document that outlines the prerequisites for all of SCCM's roles.

2:18So if we scroll down here, we'll get some general requirements. Nothing too earth-shattering in there-- 64-bit OS only, Server Core is mostly unsupported, which is why we're running the GUI version of Server in our lab environment, and some other things in here as well. What I really wanted to show you, though, is if you scroll down, it will list the prerequisites for all of the site and site system roles in SCCM. So again, as I mentioned, there, the prereq check is going to check for a default installation, which will include your primary site, a distribution point, and a management point.

2:49So that's all the things it's checking right now. Let's look at the requirements, here, for our primary site server. Notice we're going to need the .NET Framework 3.5. Hey, that's the error that we saw in the splash screen, there. We're going to need the .NET Framework 4.5 or above, remote differential compression and components, from the Windows ADK. So keep this document handy, as it'll help you identify the prerequisites for whichever components you plan to install in your SCCM environment. It looks like our Prereq Checker has completed, and we've got a nice list of things that we need to take care of, here.

3:20The red ones are required. The yellow ones are recommendations. So we're going to need remote differential compression. We're going to need to change the service account that the SQL Server Database Engine is running under. It's currently running under the NT SERVICE account. We're going to change that so it's running under a domain account with minimal privileges. We're going to need the .NET Framework 3.5, as we already know. We're going to need the Windows Deployment tools, user state migration tools, and the pre-installation environment. All of those are contained within the Windows 10 ADK. And then we have a bunch of warnings here.

3:50We're going to want to extend the Active Directory schema so we can take advantage of all the features in SCCM. I'll show you how to do that, here, shortly. We'll verify site permissions. This goes along with extending the schema. We'll take care of that. We're going to need to configure SQL Server's memory usage. Currently it's configured for unlimited memory, so we'll put a maximum on it. And we're also going to put a minimum on it. So that's what these two are here-- min and max memory for SQL Server-- and then we'll need to install bits. So let's start by taking care of all those red ones. We'll leave the Prereq Checker running. We can always come back once we're done and hit Run Check again to make sure they're all gone.

4:24So I'm going to start here in Server Manager. We'll bring it up, here, to install all of those Windows roles that we need installed. We'll dropdown, Manage, choose Add Roles in Features. We'll hit Next here, Next, Next. We don't need any roles. We're good on the roles. Notice here that I have IIS and WSUS ready to go, so we'll hit Next here. We are going to need the .NET Framework 3.5. We are going to need bits, and we'll hit Add Features here. And we're also going to need remote differential compression. That'll take care of three of them. We'll hit Next here, and we need to provide a path to the source files for the .NET Framework 3.5.

4:58So I'm going to specify an alternate source path here, and I actually have the server 2016 installation media also here in the software directory, so we can head right into here, Sources, and sxx-- sxs! Say that one 10 times fast. Let's go ahead and copy the location to this side-by-side directory and paste it here in the path. That's it. That's all we need to do here. So I'm going to go ahead and install this, and we'll let this install in the background. There it is. The Closed button lit up. So we'll let that go, and now, while that's going on, we also need to install the Windows 10 ADK.

5:33So I'm going to head back here into File Explorer. We'll head back to software, and here it is-- the ADK setup. We can accept the defaults on the first few screens here. Yes, we want to install onto this computer. Sure, we'll send Microsoft our usage data. Sure, we'll accept the license agreement. Here is the screen that matters. We want to install the deployment tool, so we'll go ahead and check that, the Windows pre-installation environment, and user state migration tools. Those are the three requirements that kicked back from the Prereq Checker. So this looks good.

6:04We'll go ahead and install. And then just keep in mind that will take a while to install. It has 6.4 gigs of data to download. So we'll also let that run in the background while we configure both SQL Server and extend the Active Directory schema. Let's start in SQL Server, here. I have SQL Server Management tools installed locally, so we can connect to our local instance and modify those memory settings. From here, we want to connect to our default instance of SQL Server on this machine. And then in Object Explorer, give that instance a right-click, head down to Properties, and from here, we can head down to Memory.

6:36These are the two settings that the Prereq Checker is referring to. In fact, I can bring that back up here, and if we take a look at our first one, it says SQL Server's configured for unlimited memory usage. Notice that it is right here. That's unlimited. That's a lot of memory. And we don't want SQL Server to run away with all the memory on this system, so we're going to set a maximum there. And then the second one is ensuring that SQL Server has enough memory. So we want to reserve a minimum of 8 gigs for a central administration or primary site and a minimum of 4 gigs for a secondary site.

7:08We're setting up a primary site here, so we're going to make sure that we give 8 gigs-- at least 8 gigs-- to SQL Server. So for our minimum, here, 8192. And for our maximum, how about 24 gigs? We've got 32 gigs of memory in the system, so that should be more than enough. There we go. So 8 gigs minimum, 24 gigs maximum. And now that looks good for SQL Server. It is all configured. Well, almost all configured. There's one more thing we need to do. We need to modify the SQL Server service account so it runs under a domain account.

7:38So let's head down here to the Start button. Give it a right-click. Head up to Run. Type in services.msc, and from here you can just start typing in SQL, and it'll take us right to that database engine service. We can open this up. We'll stop it. We'll head over to Log On. And I already created a domain account for us to work with here, so we can browse Active Directory. We'll browse in nuggetlab.com domain, and we can just type in SQL, and then hit Check Names. This should resolve to SQL-SCCM. Perfect. Now we can hit OK. you can enter the password, which is our standard lab password of "password," which you can see in the lab tools on the right.

8:15And then once we get that in, we can hit Apply, and it'll grant the log on as a service right. That's great. And then we can hit Start to bring this service back online, and that should be it. We're almost there-- a couple of things we need to do, both of them in Active Directory. The first thing we're going to do here is extend the Active Directory schema, and we have another tool to help us out there. So if we head back into the setup files here for Configuration Manager, head into SMSSETUP, BIN, X64. You can start typing in ext-- extend Active Directory schema.

8:48There it is. So once again, I'm going to open up an elevated command prompt, and all we need to do is just simply run this as is. So I'll drag it in here. We'll hit Enter, and it'll just take a second to extend that schema in Active Directory. There it is, successfully extended. Now, there are just a few more manual steps that we need to accomplish to complete this extension. We're going to need to create a container for Configuration Manager to store all of these objects, and then set access rights on that container to this machine that will be hosting our primary site. And we're going to need to head over to DC-NUG to do this, as that's where we have all of the Active Directory tools installed and ready to go.

9:24I've got Server Manager opened up. From here, we're going to dropdown Tools, and we're going to need to do this using ADSI Edit. Now, you want to be very careful in this tool, because we're essentially modifying Active Directory's database directly, so you can really mess up an Active Directory infrastructure if you do something wrong in here. But what we're going to do is right-click on ADSI Edit, hit Connect To. We're going to connect to the default naming context. We'll expand that naming context, expand nuggetlab, and from here you want to head down to System, and we're going to create a brand new container object in here. So we'll right-click.

9:54We'll head down to New Object. From here, we're going to choose Container. Hit Next. And the name here must match exactly. It must say System space Management, all right? We'll hit Next here. We'll hit Finish here. And so our final step, then, is to grant our SCCM-NUG computer account full control to this container, as that's what's hosting our primary site, and we'll be placing all of the objects inside of here. So we can right-click on this, head into Properties head over here to Security, hit Add, and our object type here, we want to include computers.

10:29And the machine account we're looking for here is SCCM-NUG. We can resolve that. Hit OK. And we want to make sure that we give this full control. And also, we want to give it full control over this object and all descendant objects. So we need to hit the Advanced button here, find our account once again, hit Edit, and make sure this applies to not just this object only, but this object and all descendant objects. And that's about it. That should complete all of our prerequisites. Let's head back over to SCCM-NUG and just verify that the ADK finished installing.

11:04It did, all right. And everything in Server Manager also finished. So now we should just be able to rerun this check, and hopefully everything is gone. Check it out. That looks much better. Although we still get this process memory allocation warning, we can safely ignore it, because we did get a SQL Server minimum of 8 gigabytes. Everything else looks fantastic. We can close out of the Prereq Checker, close out of everything else, and now we're ready to install SCCM, which we'll walk through together in another hands-on lab Nugget coming up next.

11:37I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00With the prerequisites out of the way, it is now time to perform an installation of SCCM. This is a hands-on lab Nuggets, so now is a great time to launch the lab if you wish to follow along as we get this beast up and running together. Once your lab finishes loading, you'll be planted right on SCCM-NUG, which is where we'll be performing this installation. You'll also have File Explorer opened up into the root of the installation media here for SCCM current branch version 1802. So let's begin here by launching the Splash application, which will get us into the opening screen here for installing SCCM.

0:34Once that's up here, we've got some tools and standalone components, additional resources. What we're interested in here is installation. So assuming you have the base prerequisites installed, which we do, we'll be able to hit this link, and it'll take us right into the wizard. Before you go any further, you should verify that you have a supported SQL Server installation available. We do on our local machine here. Identify the fully qualified domain name of the computer that's running that server. Again, that's our local machine here. And then confirm that the computers for Configuration Manager site systems meet the minimum system requirements.

1:07We have done all of that, so we're good to go. We can hit Next here on the opening screen. This screen will determine what the wizard will do from here on out and gives us a number of actions that we can perform. Do you want to install a configuration primary site? Why, yes. We do. That's what we're here for. And you can also check this box if you want to dramatically speed up this process, as it'll use default settings for many of these pages. We're going to uncheck this because we want to take the long we're out and see what our options are for each one of these pages. We can also choose to install a Configuration Manager CAS Central Administration Site.

1:40If we already have a site on this machine, we can upgrade it to a CAS. We can recover it, we can perform site maintenance or reset it, or uninstall it completely. So we'll be back into this wizard later on when we need to perform some of these tasks. But for now, we're going to choose the first one. Keep that second option unchecked, and hit Next. Here's is where you'll enter in your product key if you have one, or choose to evaluate the product. And you could always run this wizard again to enter in a license key to take the evaluation edition and upgrade it here to the fully licensed product, which is what I'm going to do after this lab.

2:13So going forward, we'll be working with a fully-licensed version of SCCM. But for now, choose the first option to Install the Evaluation Edition, and hit Next. Before we can go any further, we must accept the license terms, so hit those three checkboxes, and then choose Next. Next up, we either need to download the required set of files, or if you've already done so and stored them somewhere in your environment, you can reference them using previous downloaded files. Now, for me here, I'm going to choose the first option, and I'm going to download them into this directory living inside of the share over on our file server.

2:45You can choose the second option and place the same value in here as they're already downloaded for you in your lab environment. And that'll save a lot of time waiting for this wizard to continue. So I'm going to hit Next here and just give this about 20 minutes or so to download these files into that location. Next up, we have a couple of screens here for language support. The first screen is for Configuration Manager-- so the server side here. And if we choose Next, the second screen is for client languages that you wish to support. So I'm going to choose English for both of these and hit Next.

3:17Arguably, the most important screen here is specifying your site code and site name. Your site code has a three-digit code that uniquely identifies the site within your hierarchy. I'm going to choose NUG here. And then your site name, I'll call Nuggetlab Site. And also choose your installation folder here. And if you want to install the Configuration Manager Console, which we do, as that's where we'll be spending a good majority of our time managing our SCCM infrastructure. So this looks good. Let's go ahead and hit Next. Here's where we can choose to join this primary site to an existing hierarchy.

3:49We would enter in the fully qualified domain name of that central administration site that we're joining to here. Or we can install this primary site as a standalone site, which is what we're going to do. And you're not locked into this, as you'll see here when you hit Next. It'll give us a message just letting us know we can always expand this into a hierarchy at a later time by installing a central administration site and then joining this primary site to it. So we're good here. We'll go ahead and hit Yes to continue. Here is where we configure the site database. So first, you'll need to specify the fully qualified domain name of your SQL Server.

4:20Again, that's going to be our local machine here, so that looks good. Also, if you installed a named instance of SQL Server, you'll need to enter in that instance name here. We did not. We just have a default instance name, so we'll leave that blank. And then you can also specify the name of your database. The default name here will be CM underscore and your site code. So this looks good as well. And we'll leave the Service Broker report at the default of 4022. So this all looks good. Let's hit Next. Here is where we can specify the data and log file paths for that Configuration Manager SQL Server Database.

4:52And it is recommended to place these on separate physical disks as it will reduce contention and improve the performance of our Configuration Manager database. We shouldn't have to worry about that here in our lab environment. So we're good with the defaults, and we'll hit Next. Here is where you will determine where you want the SMS provider site server role installed. Again, this is the piece that facilitates communication between the Configuration Manager Console and the site database. We're going to be placing this, again, on this SCCM-NUG machine, but it can go almost anywhere.

5:23Notice the note-- almost anywhere. It cannot be installed in a server that's configured for SQL Server clustering. But this looks good. And let's go ahead and hit Next. Here is where you'll determine if you want your entire SCCM infrastructure to communicate using HTTPS or HTTP and then use HTTPS if both sides support it. It's almost always best to choose the second option here when initially configuring your SCCM hierarchy, as it takes away the complexities of PKI and HTTPS. Once you get everything up and running, you can then determine what features you want to utilize and if they'll require HTTPS and then configure it from there.

6:00And that's exactly what we're going to do. We're going to start here with HTTP. And as we go on, anything that requires HTTPS, we'll configure that specific role to support it. So this looks good. Let's go ahead and hit Next. Here's where we can choose to have the wizard install a management point and a distribution point. We're going to do both of these. And again, they're both going to live on this machine. The only thing we need to do here is choose our client communication. Again, we'll start here with HTTP for both of these and hit Next. We can Next here as well to acknowledge that Microsoft is going to collect diagnostic and usage data.

6:32And then our final piece here is setting up a service connection point. This is used any time we want to reach outside or Microsoft wants to reach inside, which is what the previous screen was all about. This is used to collect usage data from us. And it's also used by Configuration Manager to download updates and new features. And this is also the component that we'll use when we want to configure Intune for mobile device management. So this looks good. We will configure a service connection point on this machine for our primary site. So let's go and hit Next.

7:03And look at that. We made it through this incredibly long wizard. The Summary screen here will show you all the decisions you made throughout the wizard. We're good. So we can hit Next. And here's where it's going to run that prerequisite check one more time. If all those checks pass, the Begin Install button will light up. And we can safely ignore that warning. It's bogus. We did configure SQL Server properly. So we're good to go. Let's go and hit Begin Install. And I should probably warn you this will take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour or so to complete. So don't feel like you need to see this all the way through.

7:34I'll come back when it's done. We'll verify that everything installed correctly and be on our way. All right. Woo, that was a long wait. An hour and 15 minutes later, and we're done. And this is the task right here that took most of that time because we stored them over the network. That about doubled the time it took for this installation to complete. But hey, we're done. And now let's verify installation by closing out of the Wizard. We'll close out of the Splash screen here, we'll hit the Start button, and we'll open up the Configuration Manager Console.

8:07As I mentioned, we're going to be spending a lot of time in this tool, configuring and managing your infrastructure, as well as managing and monitoring our users, our devices, and everything that SCCM can touch. But just to give this a quick verification here, let's head down to Administration in the left-hand Nav. We'll expand site configuration. We can hit sites here to see information about our Nugget lab site. And we can head down here to Servers and Site System Roles, and we can see that our SCCM-NUG is our primary site server, and we can see all of the roles that this server is currently hosting.

8:41That concludes this hands-on lab Nugget for installing System Center Configuration Manager, current branch, version 1802. I hope this has been informative for you. And I'd like to thank you for viewing.