Configuration Manager can be a complex solution to grasp, as it can span from thousands to tens of thousands of different clients placed all around the globe on different platforms. And with the large number of features it contains, it also requires a well-planned infrastructure in place to serve all the different clients.

The whole concept of a system being highly available is that a service (or services) will still be available to serve the users in case of a general failure of a single component or components in the infrastructure. If a system is not Highly Available and a critical component goes offline, your service might go offline, and depending on the priority and service level agreement (SLA) of that service, this situation might be damaging for the entire business and its users.

And of course you always want to plan ahead to make sure your solution is available at all times to serve your users. We will begin by going through the various components that makes up a Configuration Manager site and how they work to serve the clients.

In this chapter we will be covering the following topics: