500 SysAdmins recently shared their experience and insights with us. Download the white paper to gain a deeper understanding of the current state of the SysAdmin field.
Uncover the most used Right Click Tools as revealed by Recast’s internal data.
Download our infographic on actionable data to learn more about how Endpoint Insights can positively impact your IT team and empower efficient processes.
Explore the perils and complexities of patch management and the best solutions to manage them.
Peer into the risks of excessive admin rights and the necessary steps to effectively harden environments.
Discover how to address common challenges and optimize performance with Azure Virtual Desktop.
This post will be going over creating the Domain Controller for the Lab. This will be the basic setup, we'll be revisiting the Domain Controller later when we need to extend the schema and start adding additional users and groups into the mix, but for now, we're just going to get it functional, with DNS & DHCP. This post is 99% pictures, not much text.
If we have a lab and we want to keep it separate from rest of our environment, we need a gateway. You can do this with a linux VM, another physical router, or several other options. For our lab, we decided to use Microsoft Windows Server to be our gateway.
This is a bonus, you can do everything you want in your lab without this feature, but guess what, if you're going to do anything that needs HTTPS, having your own Certificate Authority (CA) makes this so much slicker.
This is the big one, this is our MEMCM server, so much is happening to setup this server it's going to take a few posts. This post is covering some basics, and the pre-reqs, we'll move into SQL & the actual CM Install in up coming posts.
Along the way when you setup your lab, you'll need to create accounts, groups, gpos, and other things to make life easier. While you want to keep it fairly clean and lean, if you plan to keep this lab around awhile, you'll want a few of these setup:
This short post will explain how I've setup the Source Share on the Server. The Source Share is were all content sources for Apps / Packages / Updates / Operating Systems / Drivers, etc will go. It is not the content in the DP, but it's the content that supplies the DP
So far, we've got our Gateway, DC and started to setup our ConfigMgr Lab Server, in this installment, I'll be going over the SQL install for CM.
We've been building up to this one, all the ground work has been laid. Let install ConfigMgr.
This post will go over all the things we need to do now that we have a server
So now we have a functional ConfigMgr Server, lets setup some Collections and Create a few Apps
In this post, we're going to confirm OSD, and make sure we have what we need for basic OSD. This post will NOT cover the fancy stuff, but just the basics of getting OSD working.
So you've got your CM Server and some clients, now you want to surface that data via reporting. [MS Docs] Sure Power BI is cool, but who has money for that, SSRS is included and there are some pretty nifty free reports in the community. In this post, we're going to be installing SSRS 2019, along with getting it configured then installing the Reporting Service Role in ConfigMgr.
Learn about the Required Certificates needed for a CMG and how to set them up, including Client Authentication Certs, Web Cert for CMG device and Root CA Cert
With our Hardware & Firmware Dashboard, built into Microsoft SCCM, you can streamline those processes. You can also make Windows 10 feature updates easier by getting the big picture on hardware and firmware pre-requisites. Finally, view the firmware status and versioning to assist with necessary firmware updates, which are often pre-requisites to Virtualization-based Security components.
Our Active Directory Dashboard, built into Microsoft SCCM, can identify and remove, disable, and isolate stale devices that no longer exist. It can also ensure all of your existing AD devices are being properly managed by Configuration Manager.
What to do within Azure Portal to get things ready for a CMG. This was the biggest thing that tripped me up, mostly because I was using an account that didn't work properly. So just a note, if you don't log into your Azure Portal Directory with the Same "domain name" as the one you're managing, you'll run into issues.
In the previous posts we've created the Certificates required for CMG and looked at Azure to confirm we have things in place. We also confirmed we have the rights setup in Azure that are needed. Let's start the process in the CM Console.
We're four posts into our CMG Sub Series here, and we're finally getting to the CMG setup, we're going to go through the CMG Setup in the Console.
In our previous posts, we've setup the pre-reqs and the CMG, now it's time to continue setting up CM to leverage the CMG.
So now we've got everything in place, let's do some CMG tests to confirm it's working.