ConfigMgr 2012 - Hardware Inventory sizing challenge

Customers have been asking me about what are the ways to estimate / size their Hardware Inventory information (HINV) -  (Full and Delta) in ConfigMgr 2012 which is sent from the client to the site server, so I decided to talk about this topic here.

The hardware inventory files don't go directly to the site server, there are other components (actually a bunch of them) working behind the scenes until the client creates the .XML with the hardware inventory information (which is also hidden on the client side by default) and sent to the Management Point that converts it to a .MIF file which gets processed by Data Loader component on the site server. We know that each client requires approximately 3 MB of space in the database but that will depends on the number of HINV customizations you have in your environment.

There is an known trick for SMS 2003/SCCM 2007 to gather the Full/Delta HINV file size that it can be applied in the client side, which is still applicable to ConfigMgr 2012:

1. To save off inventory reports in a client that is not a Management Point, create the following folder:

      %systemroot%\windows\ccm\inventory\temp\archive_reports.sms

2. To save off inventory reports in a client that is not an Management Point, create the following folder:

     <x>:\sms_ccm\inventory\temp\archive_reports.sms

The hardware inventory XML file is saved in the inventory\temp folder, which means a copy is archived before sending it to the Management Point itself. After going through the process of archiving the XML file, you just need to see the file size (I'd recommend doing this for a few clients) then you will have the HINV file size baseline by calculating the file size X number of clients in your environment.

Also you can open the .XML file, to see the information gathered from the WMI by viewing it with notepad or other .xml viewer.
This is really useful when is necessary to troubleshoot HINV, and also to check if the client is sending other information such as:

      1. Software Inventory
      2. Discovery Data (Heartbeat)
      3. Software Metering usage reports

The folder: "archive_reports.sms" can be deleted after you gather the HINV sizing information.

I hope this helps!

Cheers,

Andre Della Monica (SMS/SCCM Senior Premier Field Engineer)