Microsoft peer cache technologies comparison

Hello friends

I believe you all are doing good. Finally we have some relief from pandemic and entering festive season. Hope all be good from here, finger crossed 🙂

In this post we will discuss about peer cache technologies from Microsoft mainly in reference to CM. This is very relevant as Windows 11 is already at door and anyways large feature and other updates are bottleneck for low bandwidth locations. These are number of Microsoft technologies which can help in these situations and already detailed blogs are on internet covering them. In this post we will discuss their comparison and limitation. This will give a picture abut how to use them in combination for effective solution.

These technologies can be of two types:

1. Bandwidth management
2. Peer to Peer Sharing

Technology	Bandwidth Management	Peer-to-Peer sharing
BranchCache	X	Y
Delivery Optimization	Y	Y
BITS	Y	X
LEDBaT	Y	X
Peer Cache	X	Y

Lets discuss these technologies in terms of features.

Features	Peer Cache	Branch Cache	Delivery Optimization
Support multiple subnets	Yes	No	Yes
Bandwidth throttling	No (Bits dependent)	No (Bits dependent)	Yes
Peer Discovery	Through Management Point	Broadcast	DO Cloud service
Peer cache discovery	Manual (Client settings)	Automatic	Automatic
Distribute CM content	All CM content	All CM content	Windows updates, drivers, store apps
Distribute Intune content	No	No	Yes, for Windows update
OS deployment – PXE	No	No	No
Wake on peers for content	No	No	No
CM content pre-caching	Yes	No	No
Share content while downloading	No	Yes	Yes
No need of CM boundary group	No	Yes	Yes

BITS is used by Branch Cache and Peer Cache for bandwidth throttling but it works on available bandwidth at local adapter. Hence it has no sight of end-to-end network bandwidth and can increase congestion in few cases.

LEDBaT is another solution for bandwidth throttling and can be enabled on Distribution points. But it has minimum OS requirement for DP. Also it runs at server side and client side throttling is not possible.

Solution

As we can see that all these technologies have few limitation so Microsoft recommends to use combination of them.

DO+ Branch Cache + Peer Cache

That’s all in this post. Hope you enjoyed the content and till the time we meet with some other technical content, take good care of yourself.