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Chapter 7: Resource Discovery

Now that our SMS site has been implemented and our monitoring, analysis, and troubleshooting tools are ready and at our disposal, it’s time to begin adding resources and clients to our site. After all, we can’t use any of the neat features we’ve been talking about—package delivery, remote control, software metering—unless we identify and install valid Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 clients. In Part II we’ll focus on discovery methods and client installation and look at two specific client management options—inventory collection and remote control.

The installation process, as we’ll see in Chapter 8, “Client Installation Methods,” consists of discovering a client, assigning it to an SMS site, and then installing SMS client components on that computer. In this chapter we’ll look specifically at the resource discovery methods and process and Discovery Data Manager.

Overview

When we talk about the SMS 2003 database, we’re generally referring to the population of client computers in our environment that we want to manage. These clients are probably the most significant resources that we deal with in our SMS sites on a day-to-day basis. In fact, with SMS 1.2 and earlier, you really couldn’t do anything at all unless the client computer was not only “discovered” and installed, but also inventoried into the SMS database.

With SMS 2003, our computer clients are still our most significant resource. However, the processes of discovering, installing, and inventorying these clients are now separate and distinct functions. For example, it’s no longer necessary to complete an inventory of a client before an SMS administrator can initiate a Remote Tools session with that client or advertise a program to it. Indeed, a client computer can be discovered without ever being installed.

In addition to discovering client computers, we can also discover other resources and add them to the SMS database. These other resources include user accounts and global groups from a Windows domain account database, other site systems, routers, hubs, switches, network printers, and any other IP- addressable devices on the network. They could include mainframe computers or UNIX workstations. SMS 2003 can also discover Active Directory objects such as users, groups, and computers.

Of course, we won’t be able to send a package of TrueType fonts to a network printer that SMS discovers—not yet, anyway. But we can know that the printer is there and make it part of the database of information about our network. More significantly, unlike in earlier versions of SMS, we now have the ability to advertise programs not only to clients, but also to users and groups. As an SMS administrator, having access to those two new resources might become as important to you as your SMS client computers.

When an SMS discovery method discovers a resource, a record is created for it and included in the SMS database. This record is called a discovery data record (DDR), and the DDR file generated by the discovery method has a .DDR extension. The information that is “discovered” varies depending on the resource, but it might include such data as the NetBIOS name of a computer, IP address and IP subnet of a computer or device, user name, SMS GUID, operating system, MAC address, Windows account domain, and so on.

The seven methods that can be used to discover resources are

These discovery methods are configurable by the SMS administrator. SMS also creates DDRs for site server and site system computers when you assign a site system role to that computer, as well as when inventory is collected from an SMS client. This method of discovery is automatic and not configurable.

Note 

In SMS 2.0, when a site server or site system was automatically discovered, the SMS client software was also automatically installed on that computer. SMS 2003 no longer automatically installs SMS client software on a site server or site system unless you’ve also enabled the Client Push Installation method described in Chapter 8.

When a DDR is created, SMS assigns that resource a GUID to distinguish it from other resources in the database. Depending on the discovery method chosen, discovery records are periodically regenerated to keep the discovery data up-to-date in the database and to verify that the resource is still a valid resource within the site.

Recall that when you install SMS using the Custom Setup option, none of the discovery methods is enabled except for Heartbeat Discovery, which is set to run on a client once a week, and the automatic site system and inventory discovery mentioned earlier. Therefore, the SMS administrator must determine which methods to use and how to configure them. When SMS is installed using the Express Setup option, however, all discovery methods are enabled by default except for Network Discovery.

Tip 

Table 2-4 in Chapter 2, “Primary Site Installation,” lists the SMS 2003 features and components that are installed or enabled during Express and Custom setup and their main default values.



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