I work in an environment with about 450 servers, and about 200 of our workstations are all virtualized and share a SAN for storage. We have 1500 total clients. We use 12.1.4 SEPM, and have not had / noticed this issue until after we updated to 12.1.4 from 12.1.2. We are not running VShield yet, but may be moving to that in the future.
I am having a lot of issues with IO access on the SAN because they are all wanting to update definitions at the same time....
I worked with support, and they recommend we install and setup a LiveUpdate Administrator Server, so that i can use the Scheduling feature in the LiveUpdate Policy.
I see that to be alot of extra work, when the SEPM server is doing fine hosting the Definition files...
There is alot of best practices and other documentation regarding virtual environments, and such, that some even contradict themselves between so I am hoping that someone will have some "real life experience" as to what they did in such situations...
I see the following as solutions w/o building out another server *that some documentation say should not be a VM, while other say it can be....
1. I did expand the "Disk Space Management for Downloads" to 15. Some time ago it was set to 2 because of storage space, but prior to that it was set to 6 since versions 11 install. Somewhere I had read that lowering was safe, and I believe we were having issue with it downloading the full definition file every time it updated regardless of how many it was maintaining (that was some tiem ago). If it were downloading only the "small update" I can see where the write time to the SAN would be much lower. But if I recall correctly it was not functioning that way.
2. Download Randomizer expanded window: I see it can be set up to 48 hours, I could see where changing this to the maximum may reduce the number of systems downloading updates at the same time. *The tech who supported me stressed "5 minutes is best practice" though the "best practice for virtualized environment" states 2 hour or more...
3. Group Update Provider: I was thinking by limiting the number of simultaneous connections would reduce the number of systems downloading updates... I was thinking using the SEPM as the "GUP" and setting the servers to talk to it, and there for reduce the number of systems writing to the SAN at one time...
Any input on this would be great.
Thanks,