System Center Configuration Manager – Setting up High Availability

Introduction

As a Premier Field Engineer (PFE) at Microsoft, I was recently asked for Assistance in Setting up High Availability on an Environment as part of their DR plan so I thought I’d shared the process with you.

Solution

Historically, you could add redundancy to most of the roles in Configuration Manager by having multiple instances of these roles in your environment. Except for the site server itself. Starting in Configuration Manager version 1806, high availability for the site server role is a Configuration Manager-based solution to install an additional site server in passive mode. Version 1810 adds hierarchy support, so central administration sites and child primary sites can also have an additional site server in passive mode. The site server in passive mode can be on-premises or cloud-based in Azure

I want to share with you the Step to setup this Solution

Note!
In this blog, I’m only focusing on the SCCM side of High Availability but please be aware that if you want to set up a complete redundant solution you must have your SQL Database running on a SQL Cluster or SQL Always On Availability groups setup.

Pre- Requisites

The first thing that you need to do is make sure that your Content Library is on a Remote Location, Both site servers need Full Control permissions to the share and its content

You need to create a share on a Remote Location with full admin rights for the site system account to both the share and file system. I’m using a Security Group where all the SCCM servers are added too.

The Primary/CAS Server that is currently running the Content Library mustn’t have a Distribution point Role installed as it will result in the Manage Content Library Icon to be grayed out and not allowing you to change the location

Click on the Manage Content Library Icon after you selected your Primary site Server under sites

Enter the Share Path you created but make sure to point it to a Subfolder in the Share or else it won’t take the path. Click the move button to start the move process.

You can Monitor the move process below and keep in mind it may take some time depending on the size of your Library.

You can Monitor the distmgr.log file or check the Status on the Move Progress. Once the Move Progress status is complete we can move to the Next Step

Before we can start the installation make sure that the New Site Server is part of your AD Security Group for all your SCCM Servers and that the group has full Access to your Systems Management Container in Active Directory so that when you failover to New Site Server, it will have all the necessary rights to perform its function