SMS Planning Tips

Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) is a key technology for creating an enterprise-class systems-management service. SMS offers organizations the ability to inventory hardware and software, deploy applications, manage resources remotely, proactively track software licenses, monitor network objects, and create management reports. SMS is a complex and comprehensive product, so planning carefully for its implementation in your organization is crucial. Many companies skip the initial planning stage for most products. For SMS, skipping this stage will result in a failed implementation and ultimately cause companies to shelve or discard the product.

To Consult, or Not
One of the first questions you should ask yourself when implementing SMS is whether you need outside help. Increasingly, companies that need specific skills and expertise and don't feel that they have them inhouse hire consultants. This step is a logical one to take; unfortunately, few consulting organizations really specialize in SMS.

Consulting companies try hard to meet every technical need a customer has. I don't know of any consulting organization that would tell you it knew nothing about the product you were asking about and turn down your business. You must establish some criteria that will help you determine whether a consultant is a good fit for the project.

This article reveals the hidden factors that you must address when planning for SMS. Any consulting company that you talk to about helping you implement SMS should discuss these factors with you. Consultants who don't initiate such a discussion might have read the SMS Administrator's Guide or had some classroom training, but they probably don't have real-world experience with SMS.

The best way to locate a good consulting company is to ask other companies that have implemented SMS to recommend the consultants they used. To find companies using SMS, check online technology forums or attend a local SMS user group meeting.

If you'll be planning and implementing SMS on your own, you still must consider these hidden factors. Long before you start building servers and installing clients, gather the information I outline here and use it in your planning. I don't cover all the bases—the SMS Administrator's Guide (which is included in HTML format with SMS) is an important resource for anyone planning an SMS rollout. Rather, the factors I list here are important ones that are sometimes completely overlooked.

Employee Considerations
A big part of planning your SMS structure is to know how many people the company employs and how many use a computer, because you must install special client software on each computer in the SMS environment. Of course, you must know the number of computers because you need to know the number of SMS client licenses you must purchase, but the number of clients also determines the type of server and the overall SMS structure that you should use.

Most consulting organizations identify this number as a key factor in planning, but consultants sometimes miss another equally important number: the expected increase in head count over the next 2 years. You should provide for growth when you build your SMS infrastructure. If your head count has doubled 6 months after you roll out SMS and you haven't planned for it, SMS performance might suffer. And when SMS takes a performance hit, all functions—from server services to client components—respond more slowly than usual.

During setup, the SMS installation program prompts you for the number of clients that you'll assign to the SMS site. SMS uses this number to perform a calculation, then automatically tunes Microsoft SQL Server with the appropriate performance-parameter settings. (SMS stores all the information it gathers in a SQL Server database.) So, the number you enter should reflect any growth you expect over the next 2 years. Even if your number isn't exactly right, allowing some room for growth can save a great deal of troubleshooting and restructuring down the road.

Client Considerations
SMS's purpose is to interact with the computers on which it's installed, so you should do everything you can to ensure that the interaction will be smooth. Many client considerations are obvious, but a few that might not be so apparent are planned workstation OS upgrades, mobile clients, and clients running virus-scanning software.

Workstation OS. When you intend to implement SMS throughout a company, you must be aware of all the workstation OSs that are in use. Each OS works a little differently with SMS. For example, Windows 95's security model is different from Windows 2000 Professional's security model, so SMS installs different services that react in different ways to handle the two models. Optimizing SMS to work with the client OSs in your organization should be part of your SMS deployment plan.

One detail that SMS planners often overlook is their company's plan to upgrade workstation OSs throughout the organization. Companies frequently decide to implement SMS when they're facing workstation OS upgrades because SMS is so good at deploying these upgrades. If your company has an aggressive plan to upgrade the OS level on the company's computers after implementing SMS, you must consider key factors such as possible WAN and LAN upgrades to accommodate the traffic OS distribution will generate.

Mobile clients. Over the past several years, the theory that employees should be able to do their work anywhere has taken hold. More employees work from home and on the road. Mobile employees offer an interesting dilemma in implementing SMS because SMS is geared more toward computers that are connected to the network than it is toward unconnected users. However, if you don't identify and include mobile clients in your SMS deployment, you won't have complete information about the systems in your organization.

Microsoft says it's working on mobile-client solutions for upcoming versions of SMS, but in the meantime, companies with mobile employees must use third-party solutions. Altiris offers a full range of add-ons that complement and extend SMS and increase its viability in the mobile world. Other vendors that offer mobile solutions for SMS include Callisto Software, Mobile Automation, and Open Software Associates. You can find the URLs for these vendors in "Related Web Sites."

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