January 16, 2010

Choose Between a Standard and Branch Distribution Point

Before deciding to protect any distribution points, you need to know the following information:

The location of all distribution points in the site

The location of all distribution points in the hierarchy if you support roaming

The location and available bandwidth of any slow network links

The largest package sizes you tend to distribute

You should consider protecting a distribution point if any of the following are true:

The distribution point is across a slow network link from other clients in the site

The distribution point is a branch distribution point

You frequently distribute large packages and want only clients closest to the distribution point to download content from it

You should be careful about protecting all distribution points in the site for the following reasons:

If all distribution points in the site are protected but not all boundaries are assigned to protected distribution points, a client belonging to an unassigned boundary will be unable to access any distribution points and the package will fail.

If a client roams to a new site and the package is not available in the resident site, the client will attempt to fall back to the assigned site but will fail if all of the distribution points in the assigned site are protected. For more information about roaming scenarios involving protected distribution points.

If you protect your distribution points, for each advertisement or software update deployment that you create, you must consider whether to allow clients to fall back to unprotected distribution points when the content is not available on the protected distribution point. Before making the decision, consider the following factors:

If the package is very large and would consume too much bandwidth, you can prevent fallback to unprotected distribution points, understanding that the clients might not receive the content at all.

If the package is small or if the content is critical, you can allow fallback to unprotected distribution points.

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