I recently got my hands on System Centre Essentials 2010 (SCE 2010), the latest release of Microsoft’s management application for mid-sized networks. SCE 2010 has two significant improvements over the 2007 release, Virtual Machine management and an increase the number of servers and clients that can be managed (50 servers and 500 clients). This post is an overview of the installation process.
SCE 2010’s installer checks to ensure pre-reqs are installed and if they are not found installs the missing items. Requirements are:
- Windows 2008R2, Windows 2003 sp2,SBS 2008 or EBS 2008
- Active Directory
- .NET Framework 3.5sp1
- IIS
- SQLserver (either local or remote)
- 20GB disk space (150GB to manage virtual machines)
- 4GB RAM recommended
Once the installation process finishes (takes 5-15 minutes depending on server hardware and pre-reqs), the configuration wizard appears. This wizard has takes you through the base configuration including:
- Policy type – local or GPO
- Firewall exceptions
- Remote assistance configuration
- Computer discovery settings
- Email notifications
- Proxy settings
- Monitoring configuration
- Application error monitoring
- Microsoft updates
- Update languages
- Update classifications
- Update deployment
Once the configuration is applied you are ready to discover devices for management. This is achieved using a wizard with various discovery methods.
Once the discovery process is complete SCE 2010 is ready to use.
SharePoint lightbulb moments 
One of the biggest holes in SCE is the ability to use WSUS servers already in an organisation. It can neither get updates from an upstream server or provide downstream updates