August 2016 MNSCUG Meeting Notes

Thanks to Parallels for their session and sponsorship and to Garth for taking time away from home!

Here are the meeting notes Fred took:

Garth Jones was our main speaker and Parallels sponsored (Silver) 

Parallels - 

What happens with your macs?  Either standup an entire separate infrastructure to manage them or ignore them.  Parallels helps you manage the Mac in a very similar fashion to how you manage windows PCs.  

Configuration Manager management for Mac is lacking.  It really ends up being just inventory.  And is hard to setup.  Parallels can handle PKI but it is not required.  ConfigMgr requires a PKI infrastructure. 

Parallels mac can do AD discovery and auto deploy the client.  If you are using the Parallels client, no need for the MS client.  It will duplicate the record in CM if it used. 

You can create and deploy Cis that are custom to Mac, with lots of Mac specific functionality using native CM Console. 

Manage Mac encryption with Parallels Mac management. 

You can create a task sequence for OSD as well. 

Garth - 

When looking at SQL views - 

V_GS - current 

V_HS - history 

There is a view that shows friendly name of classes and its corresponding view name.  (view name unknown at this time) 

Most views are "nolock" against the tables.   

The views are supposed to stay named the same from release to release.  This isnt exact, but its generally true. 

Looking for netbios name?  v_r_system_valid  (no history available)  There are other oddly named tables too.  (OU container for example).  (No history with 'R' views) 

When looking for latest IP address for example, use hardware inventory. (assuming it runs relatively frequently).  Actually, just join v_r_system on v_ra_system_ipaddresses as that comes up via DDR and heartbeat which ususally run more often than hinv.

v_r_system_valid (this is current information) use this for real time data.  i.e. if you delete an account, it will be removed from here in a timely manner. 

You should use the build in index task AND the ola script.The built in index task will help create indexes for custom classes you create.  Without the CM indexing task the index never gets created and then the Ola script will not help you.  The index needs to get created first via the built in maintenance task first before the Ola script is helpful. 

Role Based Access can significantly reduce the performance of your reports.  For tips and tricks on how to work around this check out Garth's book. 

In SQL Management Studio - Ctrl-l in a sql query it shows the query execution plan. 

Another cheat - select to 100 from a query to limit the results. 

Report designing tools - 

BIDS - this has snap to grid.  Other tools do not. There is a ruler as well.  OK forget Garth here.  No way anyone should be installing anything dated 2005.

SSDT-BI -  

Report Builder - 2016 is the new version.  Its standalone and supported with CM Current Branch.