What do people think about the idea of having a dedicated machine in a server environment which deals with all the scheduled tasks? I can think of pro and cons of having one but thought I'd open it up for general discussion.

Hiya, In 99% of all cases, I think it would be a waste of a hardware, software and maintenance time.... I would rather turn it around and ask for any good reason why to setup a dedicated server for running scheduled tasks... What job would you see as appropriate as running on the server?

It is not system and secure configuration. Namely the situation when "scheduler"server is down is critical. Distributed scheduler tasks in every server are just fine. On the other hand, if you have large environment, it pays of to have management server(s) that guards and in some respect ther run task on environment servers. I mean system center family http://www.microsoft.com/cze/systemcenter/ Regards Milos

Hi, Quick background. I recently has a situation where I had to set up a regular scheduled task which involved executing programs and shifting XML files between servers and I was unsure which of our servers to put the scheduled task on. This lead me on to thinking about a dedicated server (probably virtual) which all tasks could be put on. I know that this could lead to putting all your eggs in one basket and the problems that could arise if the dedicated server was down. I'm coming round to thinking it's probably not a good idea. Thanks for your reply.