Chapter 3. Making ConfigMgr aware of your environment
After it’s been installed, the first ConfigMgr primary site server in your environment is a remarkably empty place. Only the most critical ConfigMgr server roles are installed and enabled, so the server is something of a blank slate, waiting for you to tell it what to do.
As you work through the book, you’ll add more and more server roles to your ConfigMgr server, making it more flexible and capable, but the first thing to do is to make the server “aware” of the lab environment so that it can start interacting with it.
As shown in figure 3.1, by the end of this chapter you’ll be able to configure ConfigMgr to discover machines, users, groups, sites, and subnets in your Active Directory (AD) environment, as well as create management boundaries and boundary groups that are ready to service your ConfigMgr clients. The steps you’ll take in this chapter will form a solid foundation for the rest of the book.
Figure 3.1. By the end of this chapter, you’ll be an expert in ConfigMgr discovery methods, among other things!
You’ll deal with Active Directory quite a bit in this chapter. If you’re unsure about any of the AD concepts, or if you’re comfortable with AD but want to gain even deeper insight, track down Learn Active Directory in a Month of Lunches by Richard Siddaway. Given that AD is such a core dependency of ConfigMgr, the more you know about it, the more empowered you’ll be as a ConfigMgr administrator!