Prefered Management Points - thoughts?

[cumbrianblues]

Hello all

Just want your thoughts on using prefered management points. I work for an international company, we are mainly based in the UK, but we also have offices in Australia. we have around 7000 clients - and are growing fairly fast. 5.5k are in the UK, 1.5k in Aus.

As most clients are in the UK, this is where our primary site server is in one of our Data Centre's (DC) we have a backup DC where MS suggested a secondary management point for load balancing, and because we have 1.5k client in Aus they suggested a MP in our Aus DC (network latency is 300ms). We have been working on the UK infrastruture, but now we are ready to start the install of the Australian infrastructure. (you can probably tell where im going with this). We have setup the new MP in Australia and now some of the UK clients are using that.

So i was all set to add the two UK Management Points to the UK Boundary Groups (for the local branch offices) when I realised an issue - most of the UK Branch offices have a local DP to reduce network bandwidth, the two data centres each have a DP to supply devices using VPN. (in DC 1 this is the primary site server - which runs the DP and MP).

The issue is that if I add the Primary site server as a prefered management point it will also be added as a prefered DP which is not what we want as we want clients to use the local DP. So what would you do to fix the issue?

1. Take off the DP role from the primary site server and onto a new server -  that way we could use the Primary Site Server and the MP in DC2 as prefered MP's for the UK.

2. Take of the MP role from the primary site server and onto a new server - that way we could use the new MP Server and the MP in DC2 as prefered MP's for the UK.

3. Specifiy the MP in DC2 as prefered managment point for all the local branch office boundary groups, and then have the DC1 boundary groups as the fall back option? (this is the plan for Australia - get them to use local MP and fall back to PS if needed)

4. any other ideas?

Attached is a screen shot of the setup as is planned - the onyl server in Aus at the min is the MP.

Thanks