Controlling Discovery and Client Installation

  • Article

When you install the SMS client core software automatically in a large SMS site, many computers attempt to install the client in a small period of time, such as an hour or two. The load on your network and SMS site systems might be excessive, causing adverse effects on network usage or client computers. For this reason, you should carefully control SMS client installation at large sites.

Note:

  • When you enable SMS software or hardware inventory, the default simple schedule invokes inventory at midnight on the day of client installation. By default, SMS schedules these computers to conduct another inventory seven days later. By staggering client installation times over a longer period of time, you preserve network bandwidth because the number of clients taking and reporting inventory information about subsequent inventory days will also be staggered.

To predict whether the SMS client deployment will adversely affect your site, multiply the number of potential clients by the size of the SMS client software in megabits. Then divide this number by the time period in seconds during which the clients will be installed, presuming the client installation requests are at an evenly distributed rate. Compare the resulting number with the speed of the slowest point in your network. If the network use seems excessive - for example, you might consider more than 25 percent as excessive - then you must control the client installation.

Controlling client deployment can be done by using a variety of techniques that enable the client discovery or installation technique in such a way that only a limited number of clients are installed at one time. For example, you might not want to use logon scripts to discover or install too many clients over a short period of time. This is especially important if you have many users running a common logon script.

Discovery methods are designed to automatically find SMS resources. If your organization has many resources, and you configure the discovery methods inappropriately, SMS might discover many resources simultaneously. This can impose a significant workload on your network and some SMS component servers. To avoid this, you must control discovery.

Network Discovery

You control the rate at which Network Discovery discovers resources by incrementally enabling and configuring Network Discovery options. For example, if you configure Network Discovery to search specific IP subnets to discover resources, you can control discovery by adding only one subnet to the configuration each time Network Discovery is run. Watch the impact of Network Discovery using that one subnet, and add subnets more rapidly if the load is not excessive. Add subnets one at a time, in a similarly controlled manner.

You can specify several schedules if you want Network Discovery to run at specific times, including a recurrence pattern that causes Network Discovery to run at regular intervals. New schedules and schedule changes go into effect as soon as they are written to the SMS site control file. When you run Network Discovery on a primary site server, there is a brief delay of about one minute in writing to the site control file. The delay is longer if you are configuring Network Discovery for a child site from the parent site, because the update to the child site control file depends on the schedule for intersites communication to the child site address.

If the scheduled time has passed when the data is written to the site control file, the first Network Discovery does not begin until the next scheduled time. For example, if you set Network Discovery to run every Monday at 5:00 P.M., but the schedule is not written to the site control file until Monday at 5:01 P.M., then Network Discovery does not run until the following Monday at 5:00 P.M. To initiate Network Discovery as soon as possible, allow sufficient time for the schedule to be written to the site control file before the scheduled start time.

Other Discovery Methods

You can control the follow discovery methods by configuring their schedules:

  • Heartbeat Discovery

  • Windows User Account Discovery

  • Windows User Group Discovery

  • Active Directory System Discovery

  • Active Directory User Discovery

  • Active Directory System Group Discovery

With Heartbeat Discovery's interaction with the client refresh cycle, you cannot precisely control the time of day that Heartbeat Discovery DDRs are created. However, you can control how frequently they are created over a specified period of time, such as a week or month.

For the rest of the discovery methods that are listed, you can control the time of day or the day of the week that they are run. By setting these methods to perform at nonpeak times when few people are using the network, you can ensure that these methods do not cause an adverse effect on your servers or on available network bandwidth.

Important:

  • If you change a discovery method schedule to run more frequently, the discovery method might run immediately. For example, if the discovery method is originally set to run weekly, and you change it to run daily, it might run as soon as you make the change, even if it is configured to run at midnight. This is because it might have been more than one day since the discovery method last ran.
For More Information

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