When to place a DP at remote site

[GarthMJ]

IMO, you already have the documentation you need. You can see that PXE is taking a long time as these remote locations, If you add a remote DP with PXE, you are sure that the time will be reduce to something that the other team will like.

 

The only thing that I would do, is try to temporarily add a DP with PXE at that site and see to confirm the results. It will then be hard for anyone, including management to say, you are wrong.

[phil_w]

I work in an educational environment much like you, and see a similar effect to you with PXE boot.

 

PXE booting multiple machines, 20 - 30+ at a time causes a dramatic slow down in boot time. We do in fact have distribution points at all of our campuses, which obviously alleviates the problem to some degree since clients across different campuses are not competing for bandwidth on the same server but even so it is slow when PXE booting a large number of machines.

 

Having a DP and MP (seperate or colocated on the same box) at each site is definitely a very good idea, as long as

 

1) You ensure you set up boundary groups to ensure the clients actually use them for anything other than PXE booting.

2) You're running at least SCCM 2012 R2 SP1 / 2012 SP2, as prior to this boundary groups do not provide preferred management points to clients, they only provide distribution points and state migration points.

If you're running a standalone primary site, i.e. not multiple primaries with a CAS, or secondary sites, then you'll need Cumulative Update 1 installed as well as the setting for clients to use the management point from the boundary group does not work in standalone primary sites prior to this.

 

Point 1 being more important than point 2.

 

However if you have a large boot image due to needing lots of drivers for a wide variety of hardware then there's only so much help moving PXE boot load onto a local DP will do. You may still find that boot times are frustratingly slow when trying to do entire computer labs even with a local DP, if so you may find it more efficient to create USB boot media instead, this is always substantially quicker than PXE.

The only slight downside to this is the you need to ensure your boot media is updated any time that you update your boot image, otherwise when you start a task sequence that is associated with a more recent boot image than is on your USB drive, the TS will download the up to date boot image and reboot into that before it starts.

If you're just using USB boot media, rather than stand alone task sequence media, then you can pull the sticks once booted so you don't necessarily need that many to do a whole lab.