VSA Storage That's Easy on Your Network

Want to keep your network lean and mean? Altiris product specialist Evan Thomas tells us where to store Virtual Software Applications (VSAs) to minimize network traffic.

When using SVS in the Notification Server console, the VSA files should be stored in their own folders, not in a general "VSA" folder. The reason for this is that SVS uses the same delivery mechanism as Software Delivery. Software Delivery doesn't send one specific file, it sends EVERYTHING in the folder.

Bad way.
If you have all of your VSA files stored in one central location and you create a policy in Notification Server to Import "Firefox 1.0.7.vsa", the delivery mechanism will copy ALL files in the VSA folder, but import just the Firefox VSA file.

Good way.
To prevent all of the files from being copied down, separate them into different folders for each VSA file. Now that the VSA file is by itself, there is no possibility for all of the other VSA files to be copied down locally.

As you can see in the first screen shot, if all VSAs were copied down locally, you'd easily have over a gigabyte of information being copied down. Don't do that to yourself, don't do that to your computer, and don't do that to your network.