SCCM 2007 Performance Considerations

Many times in the forum you will see administrators ask how to setup their hard disk arrays for best performance with SCCM. While this is not approached directly in the ConfigMgr documenation it is understood that you should always install the Configuration Manager application on a different drive than your OS. With that in mind, Microsoft has a document that will help with performance considerations for sites between 10,000 and 200,000 machines. If you are running a site less than 1,000 machines you could easily install everything on one drive and not see performance degredation but I would not consider is a best practice.

What is great about this document is the detailed information on Volumes, Raid type and number of disks.

10k clients (Single machine) Configuration
Site Server / management point:
* 2x2 Xeon @ 3 GHz
* 4GB RAM
* SAS write back / read ahead cache (with battery backup) options for all volumes

Volume	Purpose	RAID Type	# of Disks
1	Operating System/SQL Server Temp Database	RAID 1	2
2	Configuration Manager 2007 installation files and SQL Server site database	RAID 1	2

This document and other valuable White papers can be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/configuration-manager/cm-white-papers.aspx



Exact white paper:
Configuration Manager 2007: Sample Configurations and Common Performance Questions

Please note that the document was created in July 2008 but still contains valuabe information that can be used today! Microsoft cannot keep up with every change in Disk and CPU technology so please adjust as necessary. For this reason Microsoft cannot recommend how to setup every different enviroment because there is no way of knowing the performance of your hardware.