Hi everyone,
This blog post is rather a personal one than a technical one…
SCCM 2012 introduces a new Site Type called the Central Administration Site (CAS). The CAS is mainly used, as the name implies, for administration purposes.
A limited set of Site Roles can be installed on a CAS. Roles such as Management Point and Distribution Point are not available. Clients do not communicate with a CAS so you always need at least one Primary Site where clients will connect to and receive content.
A single Primary Site supports up to 100000 clients. This is sufficient for most organizations. Only large enterprises who have more than 100000 clients need more than one Primary Site.
Political reasons might come in place as well to use more than one Primary Site. A good example is providing a Primary Site for every region, let’s say one for every country. You need a CAS to manage all these Primary Sites from a central point. It is considered a best practice to keep the SCCM 2012 Site infrastructure as flat as possible. Avoid using Primary Sites and Primary Child Sites which was common practice in SCCM 2007.
Most of my customers don’t really need a CAS since their environments are too small to require a CAS. Administration occurs on the Primary Site which is the only site deployed.
At my current project, the environment is much larger than previous ones which require me to use a CAS.
This project provides me an opportunity to explorer using a CAS and determine its usefulness.
To cut it short: I’m impressed…
Using a CAS allows you to do daily administration in SCCM 2012 such managing applications, updates and is the best location for reporting purposes. This allows you to let your Primary Site(s) do what they do best: managing clients and distributing content.
In the upcoming release of SCCM 2012 SP1, you can install a CAS and connect a stand-alone Primary Site to the CAS. This information is available at the following TechNet location:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj591552.aspx
Marc Westerink's blog 