Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003’s hierarchical architecture allows it to scale from managing PCs at a small organization up to managing hundreds of thousands of computers. Every SMS implementation involves one or more “sites,” which are defined by a range of computer network addresses that have high-bandwidth connections to an SMS server. Each implementation has one top level “parent” site that contains the master inventory database and may also manage one or more “child” sites, which are used by larger installations or those with WAN-connected remote LANs to better distribute workloads and network traffic. (A child site could in turn be a parent to its own subordinate child sites.) A “sender” carries inventory data from child sites to parents and software packages from parent sites to computers at child sites. Each sender is an intersite SMS communication channel that uses data compression, is tolerant of intermittent connectivity and bandwidth availability, can be configured to use only a portion of the available bandwidth, and can be scheduled to vary bandwidth use by time of day.

Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003’s hierarchical architecture allows it to scale from managing PCs at a small organization up to managing hundreds of thousands of computers. Every SMS implementation involves one or more “sites,” which are defined by a range of computer network addresses that have high-bandwidth connections to an SMS server. Each implementation has one top level “parent” site that contains the master inventory database and may also manage one or more “child” sites, which are used by larger installations or those with WAN-connected remote LANs to better distribute workloads and network traffic. (A child site could in turn be a parent to its own subordinate child sites.) A “sender” carries inventory data from child sites to parents and software packages from parent sites to computers at child sites. Each sender is an intersite SMS communication channel that uses data compression, is tolerant of intermittent connectivity and bandwidth availability, can be configured to use only a portion of the available bandwidth, and can be scheduled to vary bandwidth use by time of day.