Goodbye Nomad, So Long Old Friend...

Back in October of 2020, I tweeted that we were replacing 1E Nomad with BranchCache and LEDbat. This was not a trivial decision as I had worked at 1E for just over 10 years, including time as the PM for Nomad.

For many years, Nomad was the superior P2P solution for Configuration Manager. But with time, 1E got sidetracked while working on their 'Tanium like' product, innovative people left the company, and Nomad became stagnant and did not evolve the features necessary to provide the best network efficiency possible.

Although network speeds are getting faster, they never seem to keep up with demand (content sizes and update frequency just get more painful).

Having worked in an environment where I helped manage over 450K systems globally, I always look for efficiencies to be made. With Windows 10 in-place upgrades came a new era of operating system deployment. Some of you are probably familiar with the WaaS in the Enterprise process that I designed and built with my team. We wanted our Windows 10 source content patched. This not only benefits from a security perspective, but also reduces upgrade issues (heard of things like dynamic updates and servicing stack updates?). It prevents users from waiting for an upgrade only to wait again on patches, yuck! We serviced the media monthly, tested it after patch Tuesday, waited for the approval on patch deployments, then promoted it to production on the third Tuesday of the month.

While I had known about BranchCache, without throttling, we could still saturate the network in local offices. Nomad had given us that throttling. So how could we move on?

LEDBat is the missing piece from Microsoft that really completes (and complements) BranchCache. If you don't know what LEDBat is, it is a congestion control provider. In other words, it does a heck of a job at WAN throttling (you can read more about it here). One of the beauties about LEDBat (other than the fact that it is free and is built into Windows Server 2016 and later) is that it is sender side technology and is a part of the TCP stack. Your clients need nothing to take advantage of LEDBat. It just needs to be configured on your servers. Another benefit is that you can also LEDBat your Software Update Point and Management Point traffic as well (something that 3rd party alternate content providers cannot do).

With LEDbat enabled, we could start looking again at BranchCache. One of the most compelling things about it is how it handles content. It leverages the same technology as the data deduplication technology that is built into Windows Server. Basically, it takes and slices files up into file blocks and then searches for, downloads, and shares those file blocks - but only the ones that are unique. For example, a WIM file can be deduped. You perhaps are thinking - yeah, but a WIM is already single instanced. True, but if there are common file blocks in the WIM, it can be deduped resulting in a smaller WAN transfer.

BranchCache is not limited to the Package or Content_Id level like 3rd party alternate content providers (and even CM Peer Cache). There is no version tracking/history between Content_Id's. Need to make an update to that M365 Application Deployment Type even though clients already downloaded it? Guess what - without BranchCache, your clients are downloading the entire payload all over again (sorry VPN team)!

I have done some blogs on the efficiencies of BranchCache and also presented with my colleague Andreas Hammarskjöld, one of the 2Pint Software founders, on the topic at previous MMSMOA conferences (by the way, we have a wealth of information and utilities on our web page about BranchCache). The decision to move away from Nomad to LEDBat and BranchCache was not one that was made on a whim. Lots of testing and analysis was done to ensure that this was the right decision for my previous environment, and right off the bat we started seeing 10% - 30% network efficiency improvements. Are there still some pros to Nomad - sure, but the Nomad pros no longer outweigh the LEDBat/BranchCache pros. So, goodbye Nomad, so long old friend…