UNC vs HTTP updates for 2900+ clients

Currently we are using IIS but seem to be having a lot of issues pulling updates. Would you recommend using the UNC method for getting updates for a deployment of this size?

 

Hello,

For that many clients, can they be split into logical groups that are smaller using replication? This way you can have a few different update servers instead of one providing the updates. I'm not sure how a network share would perform in comparison with HTTP when you have this many clients, so I would recommend replication before anything else.

 

I don't really have the hardware to have more than one mirror. Is this the recommended solution for a deployment of this size?

 

If you already have it in place, I would go with a DFS share for something that big.

 

aluminex,

With that many clients, a UNC share would most likely run out of connections and have the same type of problem. I'm not sure if DFS would help in that case either.

Depending on how big each replicated segment is, hardware does not have to be anything too high end. ERAS can be installed on an XP or 2000 machine and serve out updates without relying on IIS.

 

Would it be possible to run one head-end server with multiple downstreams replicating to it and then load your DNS entry with the multiple downstream servers and let the round-robin take care of load balancing? (Assuming HTTP of course, SMB won't do this)