Like any good incremental release, Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 improves on the features of its predecessor. Although the stability and reliability of SMS 2.0 improved with every service pack, the service packs couldn't address the product's primary shortcomings. Customers had asked for out-of-the-box support for Active Directory (AD) integration, support for mobile clients, a smoother upgrade and deployment experience, less impact on current infrastructure, software metering that's truly scalable, and a more tightly integrated management suite. Before discussing the improvements that Microsoft has made in SMS 2003 in response to these customer requests, let's take a quick look at SMS, including its architecture.
What Is SMS?
SMS is a Change and Configuration Management (CCM) tool that's ideally suited for medium and large AD-based Windows networks. SMS provides a suite of tools for centralized asset management, application and patch deployment, and remote support.
Centralized asset management. Hardware inventory, software inventory, and software metering provide SMS's asset-management capabilities. Hardware inventory relies on Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to collect information (e.g., processor speed, amount of RAM, services installed) about each managed computer. Software inventory collects information about all the executables (and optionally other file types) on each managed computer. Software metering collects information about the frequency of application use and the amount of time each application is open.
Application and patch deployment. SMS's software-distribution feature provides the underlying infrastructure to support application and patch deployment. This feature can use elevated permissions to install applications, patches, or any other file (e.g., a virus-definition file update). This capability is crucial in environments in which users don't have the necessary rights to install software locally. Alternatively, the software-distribution feature can operate in the target user's security context to complete an installation.
Remote support. SMS Remote Tools lets you remotely control SMS clients and perform other tasks. SMS Remote Tools consists of an SMS Management Console component and a set of client-side remote tools called the Remote Tools Client Agent.
SMS 2003 Architecture Primer
Understanding the SMS architecture is an important piece of appreciating this systems management solution. An SMS implementation contains sites, a site hierarchy, site systems, and clients. Each SMS site is a logical grouping of SMS clients and servers in a network. An IP subnet or an AD site delineates the boundaries of each SMS site, and this delineation is called an SMS site boundary. Each site boundary determines whether computers should have the SMS client installed and, for existing SMS clients, which SMS server components (i.e., site servers and site systems) service them.
Sites share a parent-child relationship with one another to create a site hierarchy. Information (e.g., inventory data) from child sites percolates up through the site hierarchy to parent sites. Ultimately, SMS stores the data from child sites and parent sites in a Microsoft SQL Server database.
There are two types of SMS sites: primary sites and secondary sites. Each primary site consists of a site server with a SQL Server database. SMS stores the inventory, metering, and configuration data from that site and its child sites in the database. Each secondary site consists of a site server that doesn't have a database. A primary site can have child sites that are either primary sites or secondary sites. A secondary site is always at the bottom of a site hierarchy. Therefore, a secondary site can't contain child sites, and its parent site will always be a primary site.
In small SMS installations, site servers can run all the necessary SMS services. In medium and large SMS installations, you need to distribute the SMS services among multiple computers in a site. Each computer (including site servers) that runs an SMS service is called a site system. The services are referred to as site system roles. Table 1 describes the site system roles that a computer might implement. Note that the name of a site system role is often used to refer to the site system performing that role. For example, the computer performing the client access point (CAP) role is often referred to as a CAP.
Although Table 1 shows that CAPs and management points serve the same purpose, the types of clients they support differ. CAPs serve Legacy Clients, whereas management points serve Advanced Clients. (We explain the difference between the two client types in the "New Type of Client" section.)
All site systems, with the exception of management points, must run Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later. Management points must run Win2K SP3 or later. In addition, you must deploy AD and extend the AD schema with SMS 2003 classes to realize all the benefits of SMS 2003. SMS 2003 uses these classes to create AD objects for sites, boundaries, server locator points, and management points.
To get a better picture of the SMS 2003 architecture, it helps to examine how information flows through a simple SMS site hierarchy. Suppose you have an SMS hierarchy that contains a primary site and a child secondary site, which has an Advanced Client and a management point. For simplicity, the primary and secondary site servers assume all the other site system roles.
Let's first look at how information flows in a hardware inventory. The hardware inventory begins when the Advanced Client retrieves configuration information, which includes a hardware inventory schedule, from the management point in the secondary site. The Advanced Client conducts a local hardware inventory according to the schedule and sends the inventory data back to the management point. The management point then sends the hardware inventory data to the secondary site server, which sends the inventory data to the primary site server. The primary site server writes the inventory data to its database.
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