Hi David, You pretty much got it covered. Few points to note inline below:
Aside from that I would add the following. If you only have Win7 clients – consider setting the server to only create V1 hashes. By default they will create V1 and V2 (Win8) You can set this with a server policy - Hash Version Support for BranchCache If, however you are moving to Win10 in the near future – don’t forget to turn on V2! Finally – if you haven’t already done this – Enable De-Dupe!! This will potentially save you a ton more bandwidth, especially if you have a lot of common content – think Updates, WIMs, Zips etc. Andreas wrote a wee blog about the savings just last week - http://2pintsoftware.com/branchcache-de-duplication/ And Rob Marshall wrote a great article on how to enable it in SCCM! http://wmug.co.uk/wmug/b/r0b/archive/2014/02/21/windows-2012-server-deduplication-and-configmgr-2012 Any questions, of course just ping us offline Cheers Phil Phil Wilcock 2Pint Software http://2pintsoftware.com<http://2pintsoftware.com/> @2pintsoftware<https://twitter.com/2pintsoftware> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of David Jones Sent: 22 July 2015 15:38 To: [email protected] Subject: [mssms] Getting BranchCache Configured I get the impression that configuring BranchCache is quick and easy. I just want to make sure I have my thoughts on this straight. I have a CAS and 2 Primaries, SCCM 2012 R2. Other than that I have Distribution Points. Each Primary is a different site code of course. Each site has a DP that is set to Allow Fallback. It is these DP's that I want to be the root of BranchCache for each site. Both of these DP's are Server 2012 R2. These 2 DP's are the same in terms of packages. Each has all packages created. Since they are set to allow fallback, all computers from both sites can use each one. All clients are Win 7 Pro. I have checked the box to Allow BranchCache on both DP's and BC is now installed on both servers via SCCM. I am OK using the SCCM BITS settings. I already have the daytime BITS throttled to 2MB. 1. I am thinking that all I need to do now on the servers is set both to have the same server secret phrase so all computers can continue to use both servers in BC. Correct – you need this so that clients can all share content with each other no matter which DP they got it from. 2. For the Win7 Pro environment, all I need to do create GP the following 3 settings; a. Turn on BranchCache = enabled b. Set BranchCache Distributed Cache mode - enabled c. Not Needed but; Set percentage of disk space for client computer cache = enabled set to 50 2. I could use HashiBashi to preset all the hashes. Do I just run it once for each main DP folder, SCCMContentLib, SMSPKGD$, and SMSSIG$? HashiBashi is just a ‘quick and dirty’ tool to check individual content hashes. As you have WS2012R2 you can use PowersShell to create the hashes, and you just need to do it for the SCCMContentLib folder. So the syntax would be: Publish-BCWebContent –path <drive letter>:\sccmcontentlib -recurse 3. Additionally I could set the MinContentLength to 4k. Does this have to be set on every computer or just the servers? Just the servers. You have to cycle the BranchCache service for this to take effect. You only need to use this if your content has a lot of small files, but it can save extra bandwidth. Dave
