Symantec Management Platform (Notification Server)

We have two sites and are planning on having a task server in each site.  These task servers are separate from the notification server.  Does the notification server have to have the task server service installed for this to work?  I have read through some documentation but cannot find anything I would consider definitive in either direction.

I am looking for (my kbsearch-foo is not strong today), however, in my opinion and experience, you should not uninstall the task service from the NS. Nor do you need to have the package service installed on the NS.

I can't find any "proof."  But the NS is a task server, has the task service, and you should not remove the role or the service from the NS.  (Is that even possible?)

Oh it is possible.  :-)  It is possible to put it back too.

If using NS 7 then best practices is as follows:
- Every NS that will participate in heirarchy will require a Site Server
- A site server is a task & package server and can also support app streaming if necessary
- A site server can be physical or virtual

My issue has remained that if the NS and another site server service the same site the NS usually wins and clients connect to the NS over the other site server.  This makes sense since each client queries the NS for a list of site servers and if the NS replies "me!" then the client need look no further.  I have removed the task server option from the NS at this point and everything is working fine.  The potential hassle comes if you lose a task server or package server because then you will download from a server other than the NS which may be over a suboptimal link i.e. across site links.  So if I lose a task or package server in the same site I have to add the task role back to the NS while building the new task server to the remove it again.  I guess one way around this would be to change the way my sites are setup and let the NS only handle clients on the same subnet as itself.  That is the only other way I can think of to limit the number of computers connecting to the NS for task services.  Any other ideas on how I might achieve my goal of offloading task services to a different task server in the same site as the NS?

However, I would check your options in the NSConfigurator. There was an option in the NS6 configurator that allowed you to differ package requests. I'll check later to see if that is possible.

I think an additonal option would be to define a site encompassing just the NS (datacenter?) and directly assign the NS to that site.