Hi All, Kindly clarify my doubts please. In our environment, we have around 20 locations each with clients ranging from 5 to 25. If I need to place a BDP in each of these locations what is the best possible solution to do so? We cannot run the BDPs on the existing DC or the file/ printer server share. Because the Server team is reluctant as we need to enable IIS BITS and all. Our environment is still in Windows XP. So we can use XP for hosting BDPs. but XP can support like only 10 concurrent connections at a time. Is there a possibility to increase the no of connections at a time. I read somewhere that we can alter the registry to make it allow 100 connections at a time. Is such an option plausible? If its the client OS to host the BDP, Which is the best? windows 7 or XP? If windows 7 is the best, how many concurrent connections does it support? Kindly clear my doubts. Thankyou.

The 10 connection limit is a OS limit not a ConfigMgr. limit. I would go for a Windows 7 solution anytime.Kent Agerlund | My blogs: http://blog.coretech.dk/author/kea/ and http://scug.dk/ | Twitter @Agerlund | Linkedin: /kentagerlund

Thankyou Kent. So by your reply I assume there's no such thing as registry change in the XP machine to allow more connections. Is the 10 connections limit specific to XP alone or to windows 7 too? Cuz.. we dont have a customized build of windows 7 as we are still with XP SP3. It will trigger another Image engineering project if we demand Windows 7 now for which we dont have space in our budget. But anyway we will be migrating in a couple of years. So it will be better if we start collecting details. Do we have any advantages by using Win 7 apart from branch caching and better memory management?

I think Windows 7 supports upto 20 concurrent connections ...well, I would not say this is best practices..why don't you use desktop class machine having Server 2003 OS to host BDP (if you don't have server hardware)..? Regards, Sachin

When the 11th client hits the BDP it will get access denied (or something like that) and will try again later. So in most cases it is not a huge deal. Plus there is nothing stopping you from having 2 BPD at a site. http://www.enhansoft.com/

Here's a excellent blog post from the ConfigMgr team describing just about everything you could ever want to know about BDPs: http://blogs.technet.com/b/wemd_ua_-_sms_writing_team/archive/2008/07/27/faqs-for-branch-distribution-points.aspx. I've seen seen that Win7 has raised the concurrent connection limit to 20 but never seen it officialy documented even though I looked. Honestly, I would never recommend a BDP. You will be much better off using Branch Cache or one of the third-party peer to peer solutions like Adaptiva's OneSite or 1E's Nomad.Jason | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jsandys | Twitter @JasonSandys

I would speak to your server team because I think it is a bit a poor reason why you can't use the file/print server; considering there is only 5-25 clients at each site. Plus you could then leverage other roles at the sites such as PXE. Regards, Blair Muller Check Out My Blog: http://blair-muller.blogspot.com/

To Sachin - Thanks for the suggestion Sachin. But they are potentially trying to cut cost on the server OS license and only wish to use the existing workstations.. To Garth - Yes Garth. Thats the option we are planning to go for. To Jason - Heh thanks. That was a really useful link that you gave me. To Blair - Nope. They are set. No talking would change it. thanks anyway. So we have just planned to go with multiple BDPs using XP. Though Win 7 is the better bet anytime,as of now it has to wait. Thanks guys for all your help.