Bare with me while I give you a bit of background... I have about 13,000 clients, our AD is flat, no OUs and nothing in Sites and Services, so we have to use Direct Membership for our collections or very generic quires. We currently have two servers in our SCCM setup, SCCM Server and SQL Server. We've thought about adding a second DP for backup as well as off loading some of the load (when we do a new deployment we could hit 6,000 systems in one push). We're wondering if a second DP would be of any use to us and how would be the best way to setup some of our deployment load to the new server, the 13,000 systems are spread around many remote locations. Each site does have an IP range for them, so boundaries was one thought we had.

With 13,000 clients you should have at least 3 Dps just to take the load and given that you around many remote locations you might need dps at a central place to those to help with the traffic. Are you using Branch DPs at the small sites? To add a DP you simply need to follow http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc431377.aspx on how to setup a site server. This might be a print server in your area if you can get a dedicated box. The other way would be to set this machine up as a Secondary to cut down on traffic. Either way once it is done you simply go in the console and create a roll and add the System to your hiearchy. http://www.sccm-tools.com http://sms-hints-tricks.blogspot.com

I wouldn't over complicate things unless you are having problems. Offically a DP will only support 4000 clients though. If the 13,000 clients are spread around many locations have you considered using some secondary sites or branch DP's (personally I dislike remote DP's and BDP's but people use them) To answer you question though.... yes you could restrict traffic using boundaries and the IP Subnets.John Marcum | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jmarcum/|

Not sure BDP's would work for us, the sites that have only a few clients are not the issue. Its the bigger ones the smallest being about 800 clients. So right now all our clients (WAN/LAN) talk to the one server that is at a location. So it sounds like we should have at least 1 or 2 more DPs and we can use IP boundaries to make sure the systems hit the DP we want.

Yes to your last statement. Note that although many are not necessarily fans of BDPs, you can in fact use a BDP on a server OS so don't limit your thinking that BDPs are for smaller sites. The main reason to use a BDP is because a BDP acquires it's content via BITS, not unthrottled SMB like a normal DP does. The generally accepted practice is to create a secondary site though because you can add a DP to a secondary site and throttle traffic to that DP which effectively also throttles content delivery to that DP. Then, using the protected site system mechanism (for either DPs or BDPs) you can limit which DPs are effectively accesible to clients for content access.Jason | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jsandys | http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/jsandys/default.aspx | Twitter @JasonSandys