Common Client Activity Cycles

Most client activity depends on the SMS components you enable and the intervals of time you set for execution of those components, so the impact of client activity generated by SMS can vary greatly. This section provides a general overview of SMS client activity cycles so that you can understand how your clients will be affected by the values you set. (For more information about the client activity cycles described in this section, see Chapters 9, 10, 12, and 14 in the SMS 2.0 Administrator’s Guide.)

The following are common feature-related client activity cycles:

Heartbeat Discovery

Heartbeat Discovery is actually re-discovery that refreshes the information in the SMS discovery database. By default, Heartbeat Discovery causes each of your clients to create one DDR per week. Generating DDRs has a minimal impact on clients and the network.

Hardware and software inventory

Depending on the size of the inventory files generated, the process of inventory collection is a processor-intensive action that your clients will perform on a regular basis. These processes will be most noticeable to users at client computers while the processes are running, so be careful when scheduling inventory cycles. Also, the amount of data that you collect during inventory and the frequency of collection will impact client processors. For example, if you customize the SMS_def.mof file to inventory a large amount of hardware information, clients will require more CPU time devoted to gathering this information. If you collect inventory every day, the increased frequency will also impact clients. For information about customizing hardware inventory, see Chapter 10, “Customizing Hardware Inventory,” in this guide.

Polling for new advertisements (software distribution)

By default, SMS clients poll for new advertisements every 60 minutes. Polling is not a processor-intensive operation, so this action will have minimal impact on your clients.

Running an assignment (software distribution)

The load generated by running an assignment will vary according to the assignment. To minimize the effect, particularly of those assignments that do not require user input on your clients, schedule assignments to run during off-peak hours (at night or on weekends) whenever possible.

Reporting software metering data

As mentioned earlier, when you use the software metering component in your site, you can configure SMS clients to run in online or offline mode. In online mode, the client agent contacts a software metering server whenever a user starts an application. The default mode is offline, which results in less network traffic, because the metering data is reported on a periodic basis.

Now that you have established a basic site hierarchy design and determined your baseline hardware requirements, you are ready to run your pilot project to test and refine that basic design.