ConfigMgr 1602 – All devices are part of the same server cluster

Hi folks,

we are on the way, it will finally happen: We will be able to serve Clusters with System Center Configuration Manager and it’s update functionality. With the new released current branch 1602, a new feature called server cluster maintenance coordination was added to ConfigMgr, it comes close to a Cluster Aware updating solution. You will find it on the General Tab of a collection named “All devices are part of the same server cluster”:
ConfigMgr Cluster Aware Updating

By a click on settings, you can configure the options for this collection, containing all members from a particular cluster:
clusterawareupdating02

At the moment, I can’t find information about this topic on the TechNet pages, there is a small statement to the Technical Preview (TP) (click here), and some information is within the Wizard itself, as example, you can see at the bottom of the previous picture, that a failure within the resume script execution will stop the maintenance operations. But the following questions remains:

  • In the Release Notes to the TP is a PowerShell script given, but the help text of the Script box recommends to use the “Echo command”, which would be a normal batch script. I have configured a PowerShell Script with the return command, but my tests were not successful:
    ConfigMgr CAU Script Box
  • It would be interesting to understand how this feature works, especially how it recognizes how many nodes are in progress, to give another node the install instruction.
  • Does this Option “All devices are part of the same server cluster” act like a maintenance window? Which means, that Software updates, Software installation and Task Sequences respect this coordination

 

I hope that Microsoft will add more Information for this addition, so that we can implement it in required Scenarios, as I mentioned in the first sentence of this post, we are on the way, but we haven’t reached the goal yet 🙂

3 thoughts on “ConfigMgr 1602 – All devices are part of the same server cluster

  1. If the script portion is similar to how Compliance Settings work, you have to be careful on what you’re actually returning. In your test example, New-Item would return an object and therefore your output includes that object in addition to the zero exit code. Try assigning the New-Item statement to a variable or piping the statement to Out-Null.

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