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SMS Primary and Secondary sites

So what's the maximum number of secondary sites that can attach to an SMS 2003 primary site?  <customer question>

Well, I've searched all over for the definitive answer to this one - and I can't find anything! I've discovered that SMS can't deal with more than 500 Distribution points at all, and that 500 secondaries are not recommended.  The SMS Capacity planner gives a lot of assistance in planning your site, and gets you round some of the questions - but you need to be aware of the reporting times that having such a lot of secondary sites gives you..

I've scoured the Deployment scenarios document but can find nothing definitive.  So if you see something that I've missed, please let me know so I can go back to my customer (rather a large scale deployment and they want to use the least number of servers possible)

 

Published Tuesday, May 24, 2005 4:25 PM by Eileen_Brown

Comments

Tuesday, May 24, 2005 11:55 AM by Rod Trent at myITforum.com

# I've seen this question recently -- so has Eileen Brown...

Tuesday, May 31, 2005 1:37 PM by Craig Morris (MSFT)

# re: SMS Primary and Secondary sites

Having had personal experience with a number of Primary Sites supporting nearly 20,000 secondary sites. I can tell you that primary sites can support 500 seconary sites reasonably well, provided they are monitored and maintained regularly. And that the seconary sites all remain running. Nothing kills Primary Site performance than having child (or parent sites for that matter) down. The Primary Site sender continues to try to contact the "downed" sites. I know of locations that had ne Primary site for over 1000 seoncary sites (because of the above reason, umong others) this was a very poor performing environment.

In summary the answer to this question is as always "it depends"....
It depends on what type opf software distribution and inventory latency SLAs the customer is willing to live with in order to have fewer primary sites supporting the desired number of secondaries.
It depends on the WAN links between each location.
It depends on the reliability of the servesr and network
It depends on the hardware for both the Primary Site and Secondary site.
It depends on the configuration of the sender threads on the Primary sites.
It depends how deep the hierarhy is (affects SLAs for reports of SWD etc).

One size recommendation does not fit all.

I feel very uncomfortable stating that a Primary Site can support 500 or so secondaries. I have seen this succeed and i have seen this fail. It depends on so many factors including the skill of the administrative staff and volume of transactions (SWD per client, INV per client ect).

Just my two cents.
Cheers
Craig
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