Hi,
I have a SEP 12 deployment that has numerous groups configured. Groups are created for each remote location. The justification of these numerous groups is to be able to manage where clients get their def updates. The organization has sites all over the world. Many of the sites have or will have GUPs and there is a corresponding policy for these sites. The problem I see is that there are so many groups and each group has multiple locations. As a result, there are numerous installs exported for each group. In addition, if we want to make certain types of changes which are specific to a location, we would have to make the change in 200 places. Finally, the way the policies are defined, if a machine from country A is on country B's network, it will traverse a WAN link to get updates from the GUP in country A.
To solve these issues, I want to make one group for all workstations. Then I would like to create a location for each site and the Live Update policy will be dictated by which country a machine is in (think of traveling users). Locations would be country A, country B, country C, home office, external. If you computer is in the country location A, you would get updates from the GUP in country A. If you are in the home office, you get the updates from the SEPM. Otherwise you are external and get updates from Symantec Live Update server. Also, if corresponding GUP or SEPM is down, you would be able to get the updates from Symantec's Live Update server. The biggest administration would be defining all of these locations and creating corresponding live update policies. However, I would reduce the complexity of administration. In this scenario, I end up with one installation package that would be used for all workstations. And if I have to make location specific changes, I have fewer places to make the change. The problem is, I will need more than 7 locations to pull this off. Let's say it's about 10-15 locations. According the Symantec, it is recommended not to exceed 7 for performance reasons.
I am trying to find the right balance of groups and locations to minimize the installation packages, number of overall locations and reduce the amount of traffic created by updates.
Bob