Unlike UNIX/Linux agents and network devices, Windows operating systems don't use resource pools to specify the management servers that they can report to.

If you deploy an agent from the console, you will specify a management server during installation, and this will become the primary management server for that agent.

The agent is still able to fail over to another management server in the event of its primary becoming unavailable. However, if you have a preferred server that you would like to use as a secondary, you would have to manually specify this using PowerShell.

However, using Active Directory integration allows manually installed agents to automatically assign the primary management server and enables you to configure rules to group servers together and match them to specific primary and secondary management servers.

This also allows you to better handle manually installed agents as well as agents deployed via System Center 2012 R2 Configuration...