System Center 2012 licenses are only required for the endpoints being managed. Endpoints can be either a) Servers or b) Clients (i.e. non-server operating systems/workstations). No license is needed for the System Center server itself (i.e. The DPM server). You cannot purchase individual System Center products (i.e. DPM); all System Center products are bundled. Server Management Licenses (SML) There are two kinds of Server MLs, and a single license of EITHER KIND supports only up to 2 processors. If your server has more than two processors, you will automatically need 2 licenses.

Type 1) System Center STANDARD provides for the management of up to TWO Operating System Environments (OSEs), NOT INCLUDING an OS that is used EXCLUSIVELY to run Hyper-V. If you have three OSEs on one server, you must buy 2 licenses for that server. If you have five OSes, you have to buy 3 licenses (number of OSEs divided by 2, rounded up).

Type 2) System Center DATACENTER provides for the management...

I had the issue while doing a lot of work on the SCCM 2012 server in building PXE build images and going through adding drivers for each of the bare-metal machines I knew I would have to build against.

When I looked at the PXE service, I found it was off and attempted to start it. Starting it failed, so I went to the System log to try to find out what was the issue and found this message.

After trying a number of different solutions for this, the refreshing the boot image packages on the server allowed me to bring the needed services back online.

In System Center Configuration Manager 2007, one of the handiest tools that came from the downloadable SCCM Toolkit was Trace32.exe.  Trace32 is a viewer for .log files that, by default, highlights warnings and errors.  It’s a pretty nifty tool and quite handy for searching through the copious log files that SCCM generates.

The Unified Installer fails with Invalid Location for the SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 and CU4 folders.