We are just getting into entering our applications into TEM for deployment across our global sites. Some of these applications are very large (1Gb+) in size.
My question, how has your experience been with these types of deployments? Any recommendations, things to be concious of, additional thoughts?
I am testing with a large file and it is taking longer than I initially anticipated that it would. It hasn’t failed though either, so it is a waiting game.
TEM is pretty good at this, though it all depends on your environment.
Here are some things to consider:
Setting your tem server and relay cache size to be large. The Property for this _BESGather_Download_CacheLimitMB. Remember it’ll consume twice as much as space as you set for this. 25-50GB is realistic for when you have a large amounts of large software installers.
Having the best networking possible between your relays and clients.
Remember that the download takes time to cascade through the TEM environment. pre-populating a large installer on your relay caches before large deployments is a very good idea to speed up the process. If all the relays already have the content the clients would have to wait for it to be downloaded and cached first.
If you are going to have the action pre-download the content, make sure to set that client precache size (property _BESClient_Download_PreCacheStageDiskLimitMB). The default value of the BES client property “_BESClient_Download_PreCacheStageDiskLimitMB” is 250.
Make sure you set your client cache limits to be high enough to handle the download sizes as well as ensure they have enough disk space. Download file size + extracted file size + how much space the install will use installing the application. Also it’s best to assume that the cache won’t clear for at least a day.
Remember that when you can very easily saturate your networks when pushing out large content.
If you set time constraints on an action, realize that if a 3 hour installer starts the minute before the window is to end the installer/action keeps going until it’s done.
The largest software installer we pushed at my previous job was about 14GB and it went without a problem.
You can precache your relays by pushing the software out to a very small subset of test machines. Though when in doubt, you can use whatever means you have to get the files into relays cache directories. In a pinch, we’d just copy the files via cifs.
Much of this I have in place already, but you hit on some great points that I need to address in my environment. Also, I have download throttling in place to keep the links from being flooded, but know that this will in turn slow down the process.