Client Management Suite

Hi,

What would be the best way to control the number of clients downloading a package to install that are part of a Managed Software Delivery Policy? Should I adjust the multicast settings in Targeted Agent Settings? More specifically I'd like control the number of simulatenous downloads, if that is possible. In this particular instances these clients would be pulling from a single site server and the clients are mostly at home users. So a Site Server is not really an option. Just looking for ideas if I am not going in the right direction with this.

Thanks.

AFAIR client will doesn't download all packages in 1 time, since MD policy has sequence of software where to check a compliance and then to download package for remediation, therefore client will download each software package separately, according to schedule.

If you want to control network bandwith, then you can set it in same "Targeted Agent Settings" policy for clients.

Muticast won't be used for home users, it's only for users on the same subnet to download from other users on that subnet who already have the package.

You should be able to find a setting in IIS that limits the number of connections, you might even be able to set that just for the one package.
 

Thanks to all who replied!

Hi,

One of our VPN concentrators we have a site server setup to for computers for its assigned subnets, but I am not a fan of doing this through multicasting. Things get really hairy with VPN users fast. No way of predicting how long they will be online and such. As it relates to the MSD I only have one schedule setup and that is for compliance. Even if I did have two schedules how can I know that xx of computers will only download a package at a given time. I do like Andy's idea of tweaking IIS to limit the number of simulatenous connections and if that can be done per package that would even be better. Have you done this before for just one package? Not sure how I would go about doing this.

I'm not sure I've understood properly the problem you're trying to fix/avoid. Would home users not each have their own "pipe" so provided you use the bandwidth throttling settings in the agent to stop the agent maxing out the user's home broadband there shouldn't be an issue.

I've not tinkered with IIS to do this before but each package should have it's own settings, I'm not sure if the one to limit the number of connections works at this level.
 

Sorry if explanation was poor. What we are trying to avoid is the VPN concentrators getting maxed out do to multiple connections to it downloading the package. I have toyed around with bandwidth throttling before and had issues with. We are on an old NS 7.1 version.
 

Ah, gotcha. The trouble with Bandwidth throttling is that Agent 1 will use, say 50% of the bandwidth it sees, Agent 2 will use 50% of the remainder so you have 75% being used in total, Agent 3 will then use 50% of the remainder giving 87.5% being used and so on.

Perhaps you could make up 10 filters for PCs with names ending in '0', '1', '2' etc. Then have 10 policies all working at different times each with a target of:

• ECNI [Main filter]
• ECNI Ending in n

But of course this only works if your PC names all end in numbers.

Interesting. Maybe a fair amount of leg work involved. Did I mention our DNS is messed is not optimized for VPN computers coming in on a 192.168.x.x IP address. It needs to get redone, but that is not for me to tackle. Thanks for ideas.

No problem. I find the "Ending in" filters are useful for a lot of phased rollouts, patching and the like.