Statically assigned relay per OS?

We currently use BigFix strictly for managing Windows Servers and a big part of that is Microsoft Patching. We have 3 main data centers and enough servers in 2 of the 3 to need multiple Relays in those data centers. That said, does it make sense to try to group servers by Windows Version and assign them to the same relay? so that the patches specific to a given OS are only needed on the relay for those servers on that OS? or does it make more sense to distribute them evenly across relays and/or if we have multiple patch events/windows each month. does it make more sense to group those in the same event onto the same relay or to distribute them across relays?

Thanks,
Richard

I think if you ask four people, you’d get four different opinions. There’s a bit of art to it.

Personally I think the payoff is not worth the effort of separating relays by OS, but there may be some value in limiting the bandwidth between data centers. The method I usually prefer is to designate one relay as the “bridgehead” relay for the site; only this relay would go upstream out of the data center to download from the higher-level relays. This way any given download file only needs to cross the WAN link once, then cached on the bridgehead and available to any other in-site relays that need it.

The remaining relays inside the data center would use this bridgehead as their upstream relay, with one or two of them using additional higher-level relays as their secondaries, in case of an outage on the bridgehead.
Clients, I usually evenly distributed among the relays withing the data center. Automatic Relay Select is usually sufficient for that without any customization.

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Thanks again for the prompt response!