Recently i completed a somewhat challenging SCCM upgrade from:
SCCM 2012 R2
Server 2008
SQL 2008 R2
2 SMS providers, 2 MP’s, 130-odd DP’s, SMP’s
33,000 odd clients
to:
SCCM CB (1902 at time of upgrade)
Server 2016 (latest the outsourcer would support)
SQL 2016 (latest the outsourcer would support)
Site server failover
i know its not big by worldwide standards – but for a small town like Adelaide – its pretty reasonable.
all-in-all it was a good project…. too much politics for my liking due to multiple outsourcing agreements – but it went quite smoothly.
There were a few somewhat unique issues i ran into which i think are worthy of blogging… they’re a bit obscure – and i’m not sure many other people will have them, but hey – if this find and helps a few people – all the better.
So – after completing the move to the new servers, there were still SMS providers and management points on two “old” servers. When decommissioning these, some minor errors started to occur.
When opening powershell from the SCCM console after the SMS providers were uninstalled, it still worked, but one of the following errors would appear:
Import-Module : The SMS provider reported an error
or
Import module : A drive with the name <sitecode> already exists
I checked a number of things, initially thinking that maybe the SMS providers had not uninstalled correctly (even though everything reported correctly in the logs)
First – The table in the SQL database which holds this data is “smsdata” – viewing this confirmed the provider was correct
Next – WMI – using WBEMtest, point it at the root\SMS namespace on the site server and failover site server, then enumerate the class “SMSProvider” – the correct SMS providers showed up here too.
Next – i had a look at the registry on a machine with the console installed and noticed HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ConfigMgr10\AdminUI\MRU still had the “old” server listed… once the entry to the “old” server was removed, the errors stopped occurring
In follow up to this, there were still complaints about new users going to the “old” site server by default. This can be updated in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\ConfigMgr10\AdminUI\Connection\Server (on x64 machines…. which i would be surprised if there are admins out there not running x64)
These changes could be performed manually, or via SCCM, but my preference is via group policy preferences. Check for the existence of the console, if it exists, then delete the hkCU key and update the HKLM value
This one was not a big one – powershell still worked after the initial error, the console exhibited no issues – but removing warnings/errors where-ever possible is always good.