If you haven’t seen the parent post for this article, jump back here to see a complete list of all new features in Configuration Manager 1906.

This post covers the specific additions and improvements to the site infrastructure that were added to Configuration Manager 1906.

Site Server Maintenance Task Improvements

If you have multiple site servers, this addition in particular may please you and will reduce the click count for everyone. Instead of browsing in the ribbon for site maintenance tasks, we now have an additional tab at the bottom of the sites list which exposes the same site maintenance tasks. Simple, but effective.

Configuration Manager Update database upgrade monitoring

Now when you’re performing an upgrade to or from Configuration Manager 1906, we have the status item for “Upgrade ConfigMgr Database” which will display in a warning state if there is a blocking process preventing the ConfigMgr database upgrade. From here if you check the CMUpdate.log file you will see the program name and session ID of the process that is creating the block so you can deal with it accordingly. There is a retry counter which will refresh this status item every 5 minutes. Previously this would have failed the upgrade.

New Management Insights rule for NTLM fallback

Yet another Management Insights rule has made it into Configuration Manager and this time to highlight for us where NTLM fallback is enabled. If you can avoid it, NTLM should be avoided for various reasons. Configuration Manager will now highlight that for us using Management Insights. If you’re not using this yet you really should be taking a look as it can all level of SCCM admin make their site better and keep it ticking over nicely.

Add a SQL AlwaysOn node

I don’t have a SQL ALwaysOn cluster to be able to prove this one so I’m going to refer to the Microsoft docs for this one and essentially summarise.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sccm/core/plan-design/changes/whats-new-in-version-1906#improvements-to-support-for-sql-always-on

We can now use Configuration Manager to add an additional SQL AlwaysOn node into the environment where previously this was a manual task. Along with that comes a faster failover option with the use of the MultiSubnetFailover string, added replication links in distributed views (nice). Also Site recovery will now handle AlwaysOn availability groups which is a nice addition and there are some new setup pre-req checks in place.