We are pushing towards a consolidated environment and virtualization is one of our primary SCCM design decisions we were given. We will be able to choose powerfull hardware to run the virtualization infrastructure. The current design has a central site server and another server hosting the management point, SUP, RP, ... along with 50+ secondary site servers at other small sites. After the consolidation is done there will be around 18000 clients centrally. The SQL server used is a seperate physical cluster. Is a virtualized central site server and the virtualized system server capable of handling this amount of clients? I am especially worried about disk I/O. Or should I strongly advise to go physical (against the primary design decision and which forces me to find a solution for high availability which was partly covered by virtualization)? It is very hard to find any numbers about SCCM and virtualization. How many clients are you running on your SCCM virtualized environment? Decato

That article gives you an idea what Microsoft did: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff684119.aspx

Thanks a lot. That was for sure some interesting material. Looking at the picture where they show the hierarchy, it seems Microsoft has virtualised the primary site server for 2 remote sites having 40000 and 60000 clients, so much more than we will be using. This looks promising. Just to be sure, the document - and the hierarchy picture - does not specifically mention the primary site server for each site, but only mentions the SMS provider. Am I correct in assuming that the SMS Provider is the Primary site server in this particular case (as the primary site server is not mentioned at all) ? Decato