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”:

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

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:
  
• 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 🙂