Understanding Office 365 ProPlus Updates for IT Pros (CDN vs SCCM)

Microsoft
3 Replies

As someone on a team who supports 86,000 computers with non-admin users running hospitals and government office we need Updates to be SCCM pushed, never notify users, never go to the internet to get updates, never reboot or prompt to reboot computers, especially with users logged on and not to try and download up to 172,000,000 MB or 172TB of update data over the Internet swamping the entire network making it unusable. Having computers go to the internet for updates is illogical and expensive once you get past supporting a few hundred machines. No organisations have internet pipes which allow up to 180 TB of data to be downloaded all at the same time. We have SCCM distribution servers per location, where updates are downloaded once, for all machines. They are set to push updates, outside of business hours and Verdiem to wake computers so that SCCM can install them when least impactful to clients when they are not logged on. 
We already have a ticket open with Microsoft because Microsoft's built in Modern Apps are going to the internet downloading 8TB of Data to update OneNote Modern App to 86,000 computers in the middle of the day killing all the WAN and LAN because Microsoft has yet to have an SCCM solution for modern apps  
I think that Math is an important factor for business to consider. Windows 10 with Office 365 does on average about 2GB of updates a month with Office, Modern Apps and Windows Updates. Internet usage is expensive, or it is in Canada. Most organisations cannot afford the Internet usage required for even modern apps. @Dave Guenthner 

@lforbes This blog scope does not include Windows only Office 365 ProPlus.  You're right in that monthly cumulative build (irrespective of Channel) of Office is around 2GB. However, the exact sizes for updates each month are quite small and are documented here.  In basic SCCM scenario, IT Pro downloads 2GB one time from internet and then distributes content to all DPs.  The Office Clients then use COM application referenced in blog above to guarantee Office Client pulls update content only from DP and is not permitted to use CDN. (it's not the entire build but subset of files)  I've used Wireshark extensively and can confirm this is how Office 365 ProPlus update process works and aligns with documentation.  

@lforbes I can only echo what Dave mentioned above. When talking about Office, it is important to distinguish what is going on within your SCCM infrastructure and between the individual device and your SCCM infrastructure. SCCM will have to pull down ~2 GB of files and push them down to all DPs. Once they are there, clients are able to calculate the delta needed to update themselves and pull this from the nearest/best DP. These updates can be as small as 70 MB per client. Caching mechanisms like SCCM Peer Cache would further reduce the load on the network between DP and client.

 

For Windows it might be worth looking into Delivery Optimization. This would allow clients to cache content which is not coming from SCCM in a Peer-to-Peer fashion and reduce network impact as well.