Secondary Site Server

 A secondary site server has historically been identified by a few characteristics:

◆ It does not make use of a SQL database.
◆ There is no way to directly administer a secondary site; all administration would have to come from an administration console connected to a primary site somewhere above the secondary.

The former condition is no longer true—secondary sites now do have a database. When installing a secondary site, you have a choice of either using an existing instance of SQL or, if SQL is not present on the target server, installing and using SQL Express. The latter observation remains true—secondary sites cannot be administered directly through the console.

Also, the historical justification for secondary sites has primarily been to provide local content access for clients residing in or roaming into its defined boundaries and to help control network traffic for content moving between the secondary site and its assigned parent primary site. Secondary sites are still used for that purpose today (although the argument is far less compelling).

So, secondary sites still are available in Configuration Manager 2012 R2, but before you plan to install one, check out the various bandwidth-control features of Configuration Manager 2012 R2. One key addition is that it is now possible to control, or throttle, network bandwidth between a site and its remote distribution points within the site. This one addition in Configuration Manager 2012 R2 makes it at least worth considering whether secondary sites really are necessary. If secondary sites were in use in an environment for the sole purpose of controlling network bandwidth for content distribution (some content is huge), then the ability to throttle content delivery between a site and a remote distribution point introduced in Configuration Manager 2012 R2 will be of interest.

Other reasons for having a secondary site include the ability to throttle non-content siteto- site communications. This is a much reduced data size compared to content, but if throttling is still of concern to you, then a secondary site may be justified. (In previous versions of Configuration Manager this content would be files that contained status information, site
configuration information, client information, and so on. In Configuration Manager 2012 R2 this content is still transferred between sites but is split between traditional file-based transfer and SQL replication.)

When it comes to secondary sites—or any other site type for that matter—think before following the same old pattern for a hierarchy. Configuration Manager 2012 R2 is about hierarchy simplification after all and really does a nice job of increasing site efficiency!