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Use PowerShell to remove packages from the Distribution Points

This post is inspired by one of the activities which we had to recently do.

 We have a lot of branch DP's where we want to cleanup all the obsolete packages (which are not used anymore). This can be done manually by going in the ConfigMgr Console Packages node and updating the DP's manually for each package.

 But where is fun in doing that ...Lol

 I couldn't find much on the internet ..So I tested it in my Lab first and then in QA in our environment and then did it in PROD.

 For this post demonstration I am showing this on my LAB (ConfigMgr12) but it does work with ConfigMgr07.

Note- ConfigMgr 2012 R2 has this cmdlet Remove-CMContentDistribution which can do this but am showing the method which will work with all ConfigMgr versions (hopefully).
Right now I have distributed 3 packages to the only DP (DexSCCM) in my environment.

Now we can get the same Information about which DP the particular package is Distributed by querying the SMS_DistributionPoint Class. See below:


Now If you want to remove suppose the Package with ID DEX00001 (USMT package) then I just have to go ahead and remove this object. See me do it:



ConfigMgr Console does reflect the change:

[UPDATE] - You can see the SMSProv.log that will have entry of you deleting an instance of SMS_DistributionPoint.

 Once I knew this...it was very easy to quickly wrap a function which will remove a list of PackageIDs supplied to it from a DP name.

 Have uploaded the Script in Technet Repositoy (tested in ConfigMgr 07 and 12). Give it a try and if you like it give it a good rating.

 Once you use this method then it may take some time for the package to be removed and free Disk Space on the DP. For me it was around 1 hour (in the PROD environment)...So be patient and get a Coffee while the Script cleans up your DPs ;)
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