SCE in a WAN/Branch Office Enviroment
-
Tuesday, May 29, 2007 12:50 PM
As I understand it SCE cannot have downstream servers. My assumption is that would preclude it's use in a branch office environment. I currently have WSUS 3.0 deployed in a 13 site WAN with about 300 clients. If installed side-by-side with my WSUS deployment (different hardware) could I leverage the reporting and monitoring on all the clients, and still use WSUS? What would the bandwidth consumption be and are there other caveats? There is very little info on a WAN deployment.
I really like the features this software has, we have SMS and MOM now but it's imposable to manage due lack of resources and complexity and I would love to junk them in favor of SCE.
Has anyone tried this or have any recommendations? Thanks, Ken
All Replies
-
Wednesday, May 30, 2007 12:11 AM
Ken, you could modify the SCE Managed Computers group policy object so that the clients are not configured to use the SCE server for Windows Updates (so that they continue to use your other WSUS server). However, you would lose the Inventory, Software Distribution, and Custom Update features......these are WSUS 3.0 features which are not exposed in the WSUS UI. At this point, the feature set would not be much different that if you used Opertations Manager 2007, and you would not have a replacement for the software distribution features in SMS.
-
Wednesday, May 30, 2007 7:46 AM
Jimmy
This strikes me as a severe limitation of SCE.
Will it work in a branch environment? I have a very similar setup to the original poster but fall into this gap that seems to exist in most MS products.
What are your recomendations for this type of setup i.e. 80 users in main branch and approx 220 in remote sites?
Thanks
John
-
Wednesday, May 30, 2007 8:25 AM
...good question...i whant to know to...
-
Wednesday, May 30, 2007 1:19 PM
Thanks for the info Jimmy and that's what I was afraid of.
Do you know or can you say if MS is considering this as an option for the future?
I really think adding this ability would increase it's sales. Almost everyone I work with in the IT community has branch offices. As it stands SCE cannot do the job. What say the rest of you??? Give MS the feed back they need to add this feature. Thanks. Ken
-
Thursday, May 31, 2007 5:36 PM
As far as I know, this is not planned for the next version, but everything depends on customer feedback.
One option that you do have for the branch office scenario is using BITS peer caching in Windows Vista. By creating a group that contains one client from each branch, approving the updates/software dist to that group first, waiting for those clients to download the package, then approve the update/package for all computers – the rest of the Vista clients will download the content from the Vista client that already has the content instead of downloading the package across the WAN again.
-
Thursday, July 05, 2007 2:09 AM
This is a killer for us as well.
Why would SCE (ultimately a PAID product), *reduce* the features offered by WSUS (a FREE product)??
If SCE won't offer a featureset to support a branch-office deployment, then surely it can't be hard to architect it so that you can 'exclude' the WSUS management options of SCE so we can continue to utilise the more powerful featureset of SCE..
Excluding computers from this policy to remove WSUS management, but then losing the inventory management is incredibly incovenient and has stopped us from using SCE alltogether.
Regards,
Andrew
-
Thursday, July 05, 2007 8:50 AMCompletely agree with Andrew.
-
Thursday, July 05, 2007 11:35 AMI am also agree with Adrew
-
Saturday, October 08, 2011 4:51 PM
I am also agree with Adrew
I also agree with Andrew, however ill now look into this product's bigger brother- SCCM.- Edited by brian-wncnetworks Saturday, October 08, 2011 4:55 PM
.png)
