SCCM Boundary Idea's

[jorlando]

I recently discovered (the hard way) that SCCM does not do any load balancing or randomizing of the distribution points. If a client is looking for content and it is provided 4 distribution points the client just starts at the top of the list. Essentially, it seems as though having more that 1 distribution point in a boundary is only for redundency instead of load balancing.

 

I have two sites. On my primary site I have 4 distribution points for about 15,000 clients. Recently I released patches to the clients and at the same time there were a lot of OSD builds going on. Long story short one of my DP's was brought to its knee's trying to give content to clients while the other 3 DP's were being under utilized. From a client perspective downloading content took hours and it was overnight before the backlog was cleared.

 

I am curious what others are doing when one of their sites are large with multiple DP's? My guess is if each DP can handle about 4,000 clients I probably should not have a boundary group that covers more than 4,000 clients?

 

Thoughts and input are greatly appreciated.

 

James

[Rocket Man]

I think distribution point groups should play a part here. You create DPGs and assign your computer and user collections accordingly...as you have already said try not go over 4000 clients in each....so 4 DPs each in their own DPG should service 16000 clients in total. It's just a matter of getting the collections within your PS divided up equally and added to each DPG..

[GarthMJ]

It sound like your boundaries are messed up. EXACTLY how are they setup AD sites or IP Subnets by chance?

[jorlando]

Boundaries are setup based on AD Sites. However, one of the AD sites has 16,000 clients.

[GarthMJ]

So what EXACTLY is listed for subnets in AD Sites and Services? In particular, what is the subnet mask for each subnet?

 

Then what EXACTLY is the IP address of your client and most importantly what is their subnet mask?

 

Dollar's to donut they will not match and this is your problem.

[jorlando]

Garth, I greatly appreciate your help, but I am not following what you are saying. I am not using subnets for my boundaries. I am using AD Sites.

 

My AD Site has 16k clients. Should I get more granular with the boundary? Change it to subnet mask so there is never more than a few thousand client in a boundary?

 

Thanks.

 

James

[GarthMJ]

CM12/CM07 client need to know exactly what subnet are listed within AD, if the subnets are incorrectly listed in AD, it will affect cm12/cm07 clients. (I will also affect what DCs people logon too but no one ever notices that because they still logon)

 

So go to AD Sites and Service and get a list of your subnet listed there. For example this is what my test lab show. Notice that I'm using only class "C" to match the DHCP scopes that I have at the various site.