Managing Transfer Windows

Bandwidth management is the ability to plan when data transfer to a client workstation takes place. This function helps optimize network utilisation by providing the ability to define a period (days or hours), a transfer speed and a size threshold for multicast distribution. Bandwidth management is done from the CM console through transfer windows.

All transfer windows are created and managed under the Global Settings > Transfer Windows node. A transfer window (or Distribution Window) permits you to assign one or several timeframes to a group of clients, during which the transfer of data is permitted. They are used to manage the list of allowed or disallowed hourly "slots" during which the agents in the network can communicate with each other. A transfer window's role is to provide a simple lookup service to verify whether the data transfer can take place through the Data channels and if yes, at what speed. Be aware that the transfer window only provides the lookup service and does not have direct control over the network usage.

Transfer windows address issues with LAN/WAN configurations in such a way that, for instance, it is possible to configure WAN transfers as unicast and LAN transfers as multicast. This will avoid sometimes complex router configuration (multicast being available by default on LAN).

Generally transfer windows are assigned to the targets, because it is the target side that limits the bandwidth. However, if the relay uses the same bandwidth for its communication with the master as the clients use with the relay, the transfer window only needs to be assigned the relay and share its transfer window with its children.

Each transfer window consists of information about network usage for every hour of the week, starting from 0:00 on Monday all the way to 23:00 on the following Sunday. As such the window does not, and cannot, control network traffic based on anything such as predefined calendar dates or times. As an example, the setting configured for the 8:00 slot on Wednesday controls network communication between 8:00 and 8:59:59 for every Wednesday regardless of date. A transfer window authorizes, for example, the transfer of the package to the client, but does not execute it, and it might have more than one client. However, a device cannot be assigned to more than one transfer window of the same type.

Transfer windows also define if a file transfer is executed as unicast, that is, if the file is sent directly and individually to each target client, or if the delivery is executed via a multicast. For more detailed technical information about this delivery mode refer to Multicast Software Delivery . The parameters for the multicast transfer are defined in the configuration file of the FileStore module, which deals with all data transfers of the BMC Client Management . You will find details on these in the Setting-the-File-Store-module-parameters topic.

The following topics provide more information about managing transfer windows: