Beginning with SCCM 1802, there’s a new pre-release feature that allows Phased Deployments. This feature allows automating a coordinated, sequenced rollout of a task sequence across multiple collections. For now, you can create phased deployments with two phases but will be extended for multiple phases in the future. This can be helpful to test certain deployment where you want to deploy to a test collection first and then a broader collection. All this happen automatically when using phased deployments. Enabling SCCM Phased deployments Since Phased deployments is a pre-release feature, we need to first enable it before we can use it. Go to Administration / Site Configuration / Sites / Hierarchy Settings In General, make sure you have check Consent to use Pre-release features Once enabled, go to Administration / Update and servicing /Features Click Phased deployment and right-click on it and choose Turn on Close and re-open the SCCM Console Creating a Phased … Read More
How to configure SCCM Server Group
Starting with SCCM 1606, a new pre-release feature allows to configure server group settings for a collection. This is a major change that gives much more flexibility to your patch management process as you can coordinate maintenance operation to optimize server up-time. Server groups permit to define specific collection settings for software updates installation : Allow a percentage of machines to be updated at the same time Allow a number of machines to be updated at the same time Specify the maintenance sequence Configure PowerShell scripts to run custom actions before and after your deployments How does SCCM Server Groups works ? The Technet explanation is pretty clear : When you deploy software updates to a collection that has server group settings configured, SCCM determines how many computers in the collection can install the software updates at any given time and makes the same number of deployment locks available. Only computers that get a deployment lock will … Read More