Installing Remote Administrative Consoles

During the initial test or pilot phase of your SMS deployment, you might have administered your SMS site from the SMS Administrator console on the primary site server. This approach might have been adequate for testing and learning how to use the SMS Administrator console; however, administering your SMS site hierarchy by using remote SMS Administrator consoles offers many advantages. These advantages include:

Less demand on the site server

By administering your site from a computer other than the site server, you reduce demands on the CPU and memory of the site server, improving server response times.

Distributed network administration

By enabling other network administrators to use remote administrative consoles, you can distribute the work of administering your SMS site.

Added security

By using remote SMS Administrator consoles, you can restrict physical access to the site server and minimize the scope of security permissions that administrators need to perform their duties. In this way, you can limit local Administrator rights on the site server or the SMS site database server to only the most trusted user accounts. You can then limit the security rights of other administrators, while still enabling them to access crucial SMS functionality.