MDM Server Topologies

  • Article

2/9/2009

This section provides an overview of the three primary System Center Mobile Device Manager server configurations. This section also describes scale considerations and provides an explanation of administrative control in multidomain environments.

The following illustration shows an overview of the three primary server configurations.

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The following describes the primary implementation options for the MDM system:

  • Integrated configuration: For the minimal MDM configuration, install the components on two physical 64-bit servers: MDM Gateway Server on a stand-alone or workgroup server in the perimeter network; and MDM Enrollment Server, MDM Device Management Server, and Microsoft SQL Server on a domain-joined server in the company network. Although the integrated option provides a simple implementation, it is not the most secure configuration; furthermore, because it is not scalable, it can restrict an organization that has many Windows Mobile devices to manage.
  • Distributed configuration: Deploy each MDM component: MDM Gateway Server, MDM Device Management Server, MDM Enrollment Server, and SQL Server on separate, dedicated physical 64-bit servers. This configuration provides better scalability than the integrated configuration. However, this configuration offers no redundancy, and it does not allow you to easily scale out with more servers when the number of managed devices increases.
  • Scaled-out configuration (recommended): Configure MDM Gateway Server and MDM Device Management Server in load-balanced arrays. At first, an array might consist of only one server, but when the initial installation is set up as a scaled-out configuration, you can add more servers easily. We recommend that you have a dedicated computer that is running SQL Server to make software distribution on a larger scale easier. This is the recommended configuration for a production enterprise environment. The scaled-out configuration allows for the greatest scalability and the highest levels of availability for managed mobile devices.

Note

To scale out MDM Device Management Server or MDM Enrollment Server, you can deploy either hardware or software load balancers. Review the product technical documentation for features and limitations of load balancers. With either software or hardware balancers, affinity must be enabled in the load balancer configuration.

The distributed and scaled-out MDM configurations are described in more detail in MDM Distributed Configuration Topology and MDM Scaled-Out Distributed Configuration Topology.

Note

You can use MDM Best Practices Analyzer Tool to analyze a group of servers to determine if prerequisites for deploying MDM 2008 SP1 are met. You can also use the tool to analyze servers post-deployment to verify things such as port settings. To download the tool, see MDM Best Practices Analyzer Tool at this Microsoft Web page: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=127030.