How to Change SCCM Parent Site of SCCM Primary Server Simplify Hierarchy Part 2 ConfigMgr

This post is a continuation of my previous post “How to : Change Parent Site of a Primary Server and Simplify Hierarchy”. Moving a primary site in the SCCM hierarchy involves two phases.

The first one is to detach the Primary server from the Hierarchy and wait until all the objects are unlocked. The second phase is to attach the primary server back to the hierarchy but to a different parent site (central site).

How to Change SCCM Parent Site of SCCM Primary Server Simplify Hierarchy Part 2 ConfigMgr

Note – https://www.anoopcnair.com/sccm-2007-end-of-support-9th-july-2019/

I’ve 3 tier hierarchy which consists of 3 primary servers. I want to detach the “PR3 Tier 3” server from the “PR2 Tier 2” and attach the “PR3 Tier 3” server to Central Tier 1 sever.

Patch My PC

In Part 1, I’ve already detached the PR3 site from the PR2 site. In this post, I’ll go through the steps which we need to follow to attach the primary server (PR3) back to the CEN site (central site in the hierarchy).

How to Change SCCM Parent Site of SCCM Primary Server Simplify Hierarchy Part 2 ConfigMgr
How to Change SCCM Parent Site of SCCM Primary Server Simplify Hierarchy Part 2 ConfigMgr

Note: During this analysis (in each phase), I’ve tested the client (which is assigned to affected site PR3) functionality. Everything was working fine and even the advertisement created at PR2 – Tier2 site was also working fine.

Attach Primary server back to hierarchy

I’ve already detached PR3 and all the objects are un-locked. Need to perform the following steps to make sure that PR3 site is successfully attached to CEN (central) site.

image
How to Change SCCM Parent Site of SCCM Primary Server Simplify Hierarchy Part 2 ConfigMgr

1. Add the system account of the Central server (CEN) and Primary server (PR1) to respective local groups (“Administrators” and “SMS_SiteToSiteConnection_CEN”).

Adaptiva

2. Now, I need to create the “Standard Sender Addresses” for CEN and PR3 on “PR3 – Tier3” and “CEN – Tier1” sites respectively.

  • Connect to PR3 site and create CEN site Standard Sender Address
  • Connect to CEN site and create PR3 site Standard Sender Address

3. To attach the PR3 site (previously this was a Tier 3 Primary server more details at Part 1) back to hierarchy, open up the “PR3 – Tier3 site” properties –> Click on “Set Parent Site” –> Select “Report to parent site”:: “CEN” –> Click “OK”.

image

Attachment is completed. Very easy right? Yes!

4. Check “Hman.log” at “PR3 – Tier2” and “CEN – Tier1” servers for verification.

Attaching site PR3 to site CEN
Creating a new CT6 file to send to the Parent Site

image

Hman.log at “CEN – Tier 1” server

Update the Sites table: Site=PR2 Parent=CEN
Successfully forwarded CT7 file to child site PR3.

Also, you can notice that the Sitectrl file has been modified according to add back the parent site information back. Check out the “BEGIN_SITE_DEFINISION” section.

image

5. Let the site process all the “.SHA” file/s. There could be separate “.SHA” files for each component. However, I’ve noticed the SHA file process for the components like Collection Evaluator and SMS Object replication manager. You can verify the respective log files to review the status.

Resetting update flags for collection SMSDM005
**********~Processing file PR3.SHA
Deleted site attachment file E:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Configuration Manager\inboxes\COLLEVAL.box\PR3.SHA

This process would take time depending upon the objects (collection, packages, Adverts, Software Update and Operating system Objects, etc..) in your environment. This process will change the settings of all these objects and apply the lock symbol back on those objects.

image

6. Make sure that all the objects from the “CEN – Tier1” site have been replicated down to the “PR3” site server and those replicated objects are locked. Have a look at the following picture for more details.

Note: the objects replicated from Tier 2 won’t get locked again. Those objects would stay unlocked.

image

7. Verify the central server (CEN – Tier 1 Site). You would be able to see PR2 and PR3 sites under the CEN Tier1 site. Hence, we’ve eliminated Tier 3 level in this hierarchy.

image.png

Author

Anoop is Microsoft MVP! He is a Solution Architect in enterprise client management with more than 20 years of experience (calculation done in 2021) in IT. He is a blogger, Speaker, and Local User Group HTMD Community leader. His main focus is on Device Management technologies like SCCM 2012, Current Branch, and Intune. E writes about ConfigMgr, Windows 11, Windows 10, Azure AD, Microsoft Intune, Windows 365, AVD, etc…

2 thoughts on “How to Change SCCM Parent Site of SCCM Primary Server Simplify Hierarchy Part 2 ConfigMgr”

  1. Hi Anoop,
    Although your steps were documented well things don’t seem to be so easy as mentioned.
    As detaching a grandchild primary [PR3] is a one-click process the replication was not.
    Within our environment [SCCM 2007 hierarchy with tier 4 with 100,000 clients] this took more than 3 hours and had quickly raising of 100,000 replication files.
    Making the site [PR3] a stand-alone one by detaching is primary target, but will impact more necessary steps within your ‘To be Continued…..Part 2’.
    In addition central site [CEN] database will lose the reference to the elevated primary [PR3] and even worse site system roles, e.g. Distribution Points, will be deleted out of any software package and Distribution Point Groups.
    Attaching back the site [PR3] as tier 2 did last another 12 hours [Backlog of 2 GByte of replication files].
    Next we had to adjust the child primary sites [PR3] database with:
    update pkgservers set sourcesite = ” where sitecode in (”, ”, ”,…)
    and copied the content from pkgservers and pkgstatus back to the central site [CEN] database through a export|import functionality with a temp database in order to avoid duplicate keys.
    Supported way would probably be to add all missing Distribution Points back to every package, in our case n > 6000, and start an update.

    Reply
  2. We too had similar issues with the content no longer being distributed, although the files were present. We chose to trigger replication and saturate our network for 2 days. In hind-sight, we should have a step in there to use the package pre-stage utility on the PR3, so that when you tell CEN to replicate to it, the files are already there.

    Reply

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.