So this week, I setup a lab environment to try out some things in System Center Mobile Device Manager (SCMDM). We have a new product at work which is in the Alpha phase and I’m doing some management testing to check out some functionality while one of the guys from the US is over wielding […]
So this week, I setup a lab environment to try out some things in System Center Mobile Device Manager (SCMDM). We have a new product at work which is in the Alpha phase and I’m doing some management testing to check out some functionality while one of the guys from the US is over wielding the device.
Using Hyper-V, I setup the two Server 2003 x64 boxes. One is a Domain Controller with an Enterprise Root CA installed for certificate enrolment. On the DC I configured policies to automatically enrol computer certificates and also created some V2 templates to automatically enrol user certificates for EFS and the like.
As we already have a domain infrastructure at work, I set this up as the first Domain Controller in a new forest so not to cause any problems for the existing infrastructure. I configured DNS on the new DC to forward everything to our existing on-site DC so that I could get to the rest of the world.
Then I set this up another box on Hyper-V also running Server 2003 x64. On this box, I installed the following
- SQL Server 2005 Database Services and Service Pack 2
- IIS 6
- WSUS 3.0 SP1
- SCMDM Enrolment Agent
- SCMDM Management Server
I was expecting the SCMDM installation to be fairly simple just a point and shoot operation, however this was not the case, and I’m really glad I built this in a new domain forest and not in the existing corporate domain.
As it turns out the SCMDM installation requires quite a lot of changes to the domain itself, such as creation of OU’s, global security groups and also the creation of new certificate templates on the CA.
SCMDM provides a utility called ADConfig.exe for doing all of this, however at first glance it looked quite daunting due to all of the switches and parameters for each command. Thankfully in this case, Microsoft has done an awesome job with the documentation up on TechNet for SCMDM and I was able to get the whole environment from building the boxes to working SCMDM installation in nothing more than a couple of hours.
For anyone looking into SCMDM, hit the link below for Microsoft’s TechNet site on the product:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc135653.aspx