Peer Cache Deployment of a Task Sequence

2021, May 12

Working with one of my customers they had a requierment to deploy an OS upgrade to one of there Satellite sites and did not want to deploy a full distrubtion point to site so I proposed a peer cache deployment to deploy there OS upgrade,

So how does Peer Cache work in a nutshell it allows a device to share the task sequence payload with its neighbors within the same boundary group in my case the boundary group was the same a local subnet for that site,

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So how did I setup the above in SCCM ?

1). First set is create a couple of collections to managed the devices on the site

  • A Collection to put the devices in we want to talk to Peer Cach Device
  • A Collection for the Peer Cache Device

Note: that we do not want every device to be a Peer Cache as that creates all types of problems ideally you want a deivce to sit on site and be a dedicated peer cache point ie.. old laptop or PC.

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2). In the collection we created for our 20H02 update we need to add a collection variable called SMSTSPeerDownload and set the value to Ture.

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Note - without this set the client will always go to a distribution point for the packages during OSD and not the peer cache device.

3). To set the Peer Cache Device I needed to set that via the Client Settings of SCCM.

Go to Administration - Client Settings - Right click and Select Create Custom Client Device Settings.

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4). In the Custom Device Settings you need to give it a name ie... Device Peer Cache Server

Tick Client Cache Settings and then select Client Cache Settings on the right hand side.

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In the Custom Device Settings I set the following for the client site the maxium was set to 40gb as it was just a OS upgrade.

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Note - You will need to Ok the warning about firewall settings.

Click Ok when you done to be taken back to the client settings

5). Right click on new client setting and deploy to the second collection for the Peer Cache Device

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6). Also I needed to set the boundary group to allow the Peer downloads. We need to enable "Allow peer downloads in this boundary group" and also "During peer downloads, only use peers within the same subnet"

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7). Finally I deploy the Task Seqeunce to the Peer Cache Device collection and then to the first collection where the rest of the devices are.