- Welcome to Desktop Deployment Essentials,
our new series to help you prepare for your shift
to Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus.
In the next few minutes
I'm gonna walk you through the second step
in our recommended Deployment Process Wheel,
Directory and Network Readiness.
We're gonna explore the tools and options
to prepare you for your deployment
to Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus.
Planning for directory and network readiness
is fundamental to your desktop deployment.
Your network will often need to support
the transfer of huge files for hundreds or thousands
of PCs at a time.
Then, as when any automated deployment,
you need to ensure that your file sharers can be reached,
and now as you shift to Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus,
you'll also need to make sure that cloud-based identity
is setup with Azure Active Directory.
In fact, Azure AD is key to activating Office 365 ProPlus,
and to allowing Microsoft Intune
to provision apps or policy as you take advantage
of modern provisioning solutions
like Windows Autopilot.
Fortunately, there are tools, options, and even assistance
to help in all these areas.
Let's start with Azure Active Directory.
First, the good news is that if your organization
uses Office 365, Exchange Online, Microsoft Intune
or other Microsoft online services,
you're already using Azure AD.
Here you just need to ensure that you users
that you're targeting for desktop deployment
are in your Azure Active Directory
and that licenses have been assigned.
If you're not using Azure AD,
there are lots of resources to help you set it up
and you probably qualify for personalized assistance
via Microsoft FastTrack as part of your Office 365 license.
Now let's move on to network readiness,
specifically the considerations about bandwidth
and ways that that you can reduce network traffic.
Now there are three components
when planning for deployment impact on your network.
First, PC imaging,
second, software updates,
and third, user personalization.
Now let's start with PC imaging.
As you see in our chart here it helps to plan
based on image size.
For Windows images with no customization,
you should plan for around four gigabytes per PC.
Customized images with apps
are often around six gigabytes or larger.
Now the driver packages that layer on top of those
are often a few hundred megabytes per PC
and sometimes up to a gigabyte.
Next, Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus
both use new servicing models.
You're gonna need to plan for a range of bandwidth
for software updates.
For example, quality or monthly updates
delivered to Windows 10 or Office are cumulative.
That means they grow in size each month.
Usually starting at around a few hundred megabytes
and increasing to over a gigabyte
by the end of the service lifetime
for each Windows 10 version.
Now on the other hand, feature updates,
our semi-annual channel updates
are delivered twice per year,
and bring new features to Windows and Office.
These are larger than monthly updates
and can consume even more network bandwidth,
especially if several PCs are downloading
the updates simultaneously.
Feature updates in Windows are typically
two to four gigabytes in size,
depending on your deployment type.
And Office Semi-Annual Channel Updates
are around three to four hundred megabytes as well.
Lastly, in terms of your user personalization,
you need to be able to plan network bandwidth
to accommodate restoring user files,
settings, and applications,
as part of a PC refresh or a replacement process.
User state alone can often exceed 20 gigabytes per PC
and in rare scenarios can grow to over 100 gigabytes
depending on the user.
Across these three areas, network traffic
can easily exceed 25 gigs per PC
for the initial migration,
and around a gigabyte per month per PC
to stay up to date.
Now, with all those considerations in mind,
let me first give you a few old, and some new
tricks you can use to reduce
network traffic dramatically.
So today, if you want to limit
deployment related traffic on the network,
you throttle it using BITS
or by setting limits on Config Manager Distribution Points,
or enabling multicast to WDS.
For Config Manager server side throttling
has traditionally been used with remote Distribution Points,
and starting with Config Manager 1806,
it also supports throttling traffic to clients
without requiring BITS.
Throttling specific traffic means
that normal network traffic is less impacted
by PCs downloading updates and applications.
Now while carving out a certain percentage of bandwidth
for these tasks seems like a good idea
to ensure that user productivity is not impacted
by Windows or Office deployment,
it can take longer to transfer files
required for deployment,
so users are locked out of their PCs longer
while a deployment occurs.
Fortunately there are new tools
to make it easier for you to manage network impact
of a large-scale desktop deployment.
Windows Low Extra Delay Background Transport,
or LEDBAT, is a new way to truly optimize
network traffic to Windows clients.
LEDBAT uses all available network bandwidth possible
as a background task, and instantly yields
bandwidth to other traffic requests.
Also compared to classic throttling or BITS,
LEDBAT can provide extreme performance gains
which is especially useful for deployment processes
like bringing packages down from deployment servers.
Now everything is configured on the server side
and native integration is also already available
in Config Manager current branch.
Now beyond traffic management,
another complimentary and emerging way
for managing bandwidth is to use peer-to-peer caching.
For PC imaging, software updates, user personalization,
Peer-to-peer options are being used more and more
when migrating to Windows 10,
and is important after your initial deployment of Windows 10
to facilitate build to build upgrades.
Now there are several peer-to-peer options,
like BranchCache, Peer Cache, and Delivery Optimization
to help move Windows 10 and Office related traffic
away from the center of the network, out to the perimeter.
Again, this can eliminate the need
for classic throttling approaches.
Also it means that PCs needing updates
won't have to individually download them
from a distribution point or the Internet,
but instead can find those necessary files
from peers in their local network.
BranchCache for example, helps you download content
in distributed environments, without saturating the network.
It comes in two different options,
distributed cache mode where clients and share
already downloaded content with other clients,
and this is also supported by Configuration Manager,
and hosted cache mode for when
you're using local servers to cache content.
Next, Peer Cache, which is available
for Config Manager clients only,
can be enabled on carefully selected PCs
that reliably can serve has host source
for content distribution.
Now I say carefully selected
because you don't want to enable this on all your PCs.
Instead, you'll want to target desktop or tower PCs
with reliable network connections.
Peer Cache can even work for deployment tasks
running in Windows PE phases during setup.
Note that BranchCache and Peer Cache are complimentary
and can work together in the same environment.
Now this brings us to Delivery Optimization.
It's another peer-to-peer caching technology.
It's been around since early versions of Windows 10,
but it's only been recently integrated with Config Manager.
Delivery Optimization is used whenever Windows 10
updates it's built in UWP apps,
or when you install an application from the Microsoft Store.
Now it's also used for software updates
when using Express Updates.
As of Windows 10 version 1803,
you can independently configure bandwidth limits
for background updates and foreground jobs,
like when you install an app from the store.
So we've covered network based controls
to optimize bandwidth for Windows based deployment
and there are additional tools and configurations
that can reduce your network load
for Office 365 ProPlus deployment.
First, there's something called Binary Delta Compression.
Office 365 ProPlus uses new technology
to reduce bandwidth consumed by software updates.
Binary Delta Compression is used
when you update from the most recent release
of Office 365 ProPlus to the next release.
Now this reduces the impact from
month over month growth of cumulative updates,
by only pulling the binary level changes,
from the previous release.
Over time, this can save hundreds of megs per PC,
but in order to use this capability
you can't skip releases.
Next, you'll wanna plan for the network impact
of Outlook data files,
which in some systems' cases
can be up to 100 gigabytes in size.
And these files are typically loaded
from your Exchange server from scratch,
after a user signs into Windows for the first time.
Outlook and Office 365 ProPlus or Outlook 2016
will set a default value for mail to keep offline
to 12 months for most PCs.
Now to limit bandwidth used
to reload Outlook data files post-deployment even further,
you can use your policy to significantly reduce
the network traffic,
by limiting offline cache to be between one and six months.
And remember, these settings don't affect
the size of the online mailbox.
The entire mailbox can still be searched locally
from the Outlook client.
Now if you're moving files,
OneDrive is a great option for synchronizing
and protecting files from PCs and other devices
to the OneDrive service in the cloud.
With known folder move,
you can enforce file sync from users' desktop,
documents, and pictures folders to OneDrive.
Then, when signing into a newer image PC,
those files are available.
Network controls are also available
via group policy to throttle bandwidth
used by the OneDrive Sync service.
And if you haven't already rolled out OneDrive,
the shift from Windows 7 to Windows 10
is a perfect opportunity to enable OneDrive
and it integrates seamlessly with Office 365 ProPlus.
Remember though, that due to sheer size and number
of files kept in desktop, documents, and pictures locations,
you'll want to be planful with the roll out
of policies that are enabling
and enforcing OneDrive on your PCs.
Now if you're planning to move OneDrive
as part of your Windows Desktop Deployment,
you can start this rollout while working through
your app and device readiness
to give the sync a bit of a headstart
before you start moving Windows images and files
over the network.
So that was an overview of a few core options
for directory and network readiness
and the things that you can do
to optimize bandwidth consumption
at all stages of your desktop deployment.
Next up, we'll cover your considerations
for Office and LOB app delivery
as you move to the next step
on the deployment process wheel.
And to learn more about what we covered today,
visit our modern desktop deployment center,
and keep following our Desktop Deployment
Essentials Series, here on Microsoft Mechanics.
Thanks for watching.