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SCE is IT Management solution for mid size business. But if my company only has 2 servers and 15 workstations. What do I use to manage IT? Do I really have to walk around making sure updates are installing correctly? Or there is solution from Microsoft for it.

Will SCE 2010 be overkill in such setup?

MadHatter
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Vladimir Kuzin
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2 Answers2

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For updates you can use WSUS which is free as part of Windows Server. For everything else SCE is being retired and Mcirosoft are replacing it with Windows InTune. This is the new small business solution, and it's subscription based so you pay per managed client.

Matt
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    Uuugghh, I hadn't heard of Windows InTune before. Sounds expensive and quite a step backwards... I hate how everything is moving to the "cloud". Although getting a "free" upgrade to future versions of Windows sounds neat, but possibly still more expensive than purchasing them outright. – Mark Henderson Jul 20 '12 at 04:36
  • @MarkHenderson it depends on how you get it and if you have SA or not. Since the trend seems to be that the old versions won't manage a newer version of windows (or newer IOS or android or windows phone etc) if you have a diverse OS set it might be cheaper (might being the operative word) – Jim B Jul 20 '12 at 13:17
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SCE is pretty much exactly for a network of that size.

SCE will manage your windows updates for all your computers, report on their vital statistics (free drive space, etc), and if any of those two servers are Hyper-V servers it will manage all your virtual machines for you. It does a bunch of other things that I didn't bother using as well, like reporting on installed software, etc.

Once you graduate from SCE, you're then into the big-boys toys, with:

  • System Center Operations Manager
  • System Center Virtual Machine Manager

and so on and so forth.

So, no, SCE is not overkill for your network. It's pretty much the right size. But if all you're after is updates, then you just need WSUS and an appropriately configured group policy.

Mark Henderson
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  • Great. Tell me this, is this a really bad idea to put SCE on DC server? – Vladimir Kuzin Jul 20 '12 at 05:44
  • Generally, I never put anything on a DC, but the only non-virtualised machines we have here are some massive SQL servers. So it's really a non-issue to deploy a whole new server for an app (takes about 2 minutes of work and then waiting about 20 minutes). So, as a rule of thumb, I would say, yes, it's a bad idea to put *anything* on a DC. SCE comes with a copy of SQL Express which can be very heavy, and can consume a lot of resources. You don't want your DC to be too busy to respond to logon requests (espc. if it's a GC) – Mark Henderson Jul 20 '12 at 05:47
  • If I was pressed for hardware, I would probably run WSUS standalone on a DC. It's fairly light-weight and doesn't consume massive amounts of resources. It does involve installing IIS on the DC though, which greatly increases your attack surface. – Mark Henderson Jul 20 '12 at 05:49
  • as a counterpoint Unless you are running your DC on some already underpowered hardware (~1ghz proc with 512 MB of ram) I think you'd be hard pressed to ever get your DC to be too busy to process logons when you have 15 workstations – Jim B Jul 20 '12 at 13:22
  • I've installed WSUS, but seems like it installed SQL server. Is that normal? It took few gigs of available RAM on the system. – Vladimir Kuzin Jul 21 '12 at 04:14