Chapter 7 -- Resource Discovery

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Chapter 7

Now that our SMS site has been implemented and our monitoring, analysis, and troubleshooting tools are ready and at our disposal, it's time to begin adding resources and clients to our site. After all, we can't use any of the neat features we've been talking about—package delivery, remote control, software metering—unless we identify and install valid Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) 2.0 clients. In Part II, we'll focus primarily on discovery methods and client installation and look at two specific client management options—inventory collection and remote control.

The installation process, as we'll see in Chapter 8, consists of discovering a client, assigning it to an SMS site, and then installing SMS client components on that computer. In this chapter, we'll look specifically at the resource discovery methods and process and Discovery Data Manager.