Microsoft SCCM 2012 R2 – Pre-Requisite Installs Part 1

With an ever expanding Windows estate in my lab (and being a former Microsoft SCCM Engineer) I decided that rather than downloading Microsoft patches to every single server in my lab I would install SCCM 2012 R2 and utilise a single source for my downloads. Now sure I could have just gone down the WSUS route but as I haven’t actually played with SCCM 2012 (or R2) I decided to have a play with that instead.

The next couple of blog posts are going to detail the installation of the pre-requisites for SCCM 2012 R2 (Active Directory, SQL and the SCCM Host Pre-Reqs) as well as the actual SCCM 2012 Installation.

For obvious reasons I am going to use a couple of posts as this isn’t a simple double click to install.

Active Directory SCCM 2012 R2 – Preparation

As with SCCM 2007 there is a requirement to make some minor changes to Active Directory, this means using ADSI Edit so please be very careful what you do with this tool as you can completely kill Active Directory if you make a mistake.

Using Server Manager run the ADSI Edit tool

The first thing we have to do is connect to something.

Right Click the ADSI Edit folder and click Connect to…

Click OK to connect to the Default naming context.

Browse down to the CN=System Container

Right Click and click New \ Object.

Choose the container class and click Next

We are going to create the System Management container, please note that this is System Management and not Systems Management, it’s important because if you use Systems Management you’re going to be wondering why it’s not working.

Click Finish. Now that’s the System Management container created, now we need to delegate control of the container to the new SCCM Server.

Run Active Directory Users and Computers and ensuring you have the Advanced Features enabled browse down to the newly created System Management container, right click it.

Click on the Delegate Control option to bring up the Wizard, click Next

Click Add

We need to add the Computers Object type so click Object Types

Select Computers and click OK

Enter the name of your new SCCM server and click Check Names, then click OK

Click Next

Now we are going to create a custom task, click Next

Choose the default and click Next

Click the top three boxes and then Full Control (that will choose the rest of the permissions)

Click Finish, next we are going to extend the Active Directory Schema for SCCM.

Prior to running the schema extension make sure that the user running the command is a member of the Schema Admins group in AD. Making sure you have the SCCM 2012 R2 media to hand open up an Administrative Command Prompt and browse to the SMSSETUP\BIN\X64 folder, you’re going to run the extadsch.exe command. There is no need to copy this to a local drive, just as long as it’s run from the Domain Controller that has the Schema Master role.

Browse the log file for more information on success\failure of command (this can be found on the root of your C drive), you want to see a message advising “Successfully extended the Active Directory schema”, if it’s different read through to see what failed and see if you can resolve it.

In Part 2 of this series I will cover the SQL Server Requirements as well as preparing the SCCM host.