Quick Delivery Optimization Summary

Not so long ago, one of our Pints (Andreas) presented at Techdays and covered P2P tech in a scintillating session which you can find on Youtube. This post will summarize what was discussed about Delivery Optimization, hereby referred to as DO. Who doesn’t love some DO on a Friday in February?

What is DO, and how does it work?

It’s a friendly cloud service that works a little bit like this:

1. A client connects to the cloud service wanting some content
2. The cloud service has a list based on geolocation of the best and closest peers
3. Client says thank you so much cloud service, you were so helpful
4. Client connects to a peer to get the content
5. Client liked the experience so much that he/she decides to cache the content

Basically, it’s great because if you’re using the following, you can use DO

1. Windows 10
2. Server 2019
3. Office 2019
4. WU
5. Microsoft Store (including Business)
6. Intune

How does content get published?

The content is chunked and hashed (BranchCache anyone?). How it’s hashed is a secret, and legally so because it’s client – client. If it were server – client, you bet your eyelids there would be some public info. Don’t yell at me, I’m just the messenger. The clients will check-in until the content expires.

How is the content encrypted?

That’s a really good question, thanks for asking.

Any cool facts about downloads?

Yep, DO can download from multiple sources which makes it a great multitasker. It can do hybrid downloads too meaning it can get content via HTTP as well as peers.

How can I manage DO?

Narkis Engler presented a fantastic session at Microsoft Ignite 2018 about DO. She was also joined by Kerim Hanif from the ConfigMgr product team. Narkis goes over DO management and tuning, so it’s worth a watch.

On a Windows 10 device, you can manage DO by local policy as well as via the settings app:

You can manage DO settings via ConfigMgr client. Some weird guy wrote a post about it.

You can manage DO settings in Intune. I’ve written a shiny blog post about it.

If you’re curious about how your own device is using the DO service, and want to wow your co-workers with a cool screen saver, you can use PowerShell to get info from your own device (and then save it as a photo).

Get-Command *delivery* will spit out all the cmdlets for DO

1. Get-DeliveryOptimizationLog
2. Get-DeliveryOptimizationPerfSnap
3. Get-DeliveryOptimizationPerfSnapThisMonth
4. Get-DeliveryOptimizationStatus

If you wanted to see what your device was downloading this month, checkout Get-DeliveryOptimizationPerfSnapThisMonth. If nothing shows up, go to the Microsoft Store and start downloading games business productivity apps then go check again.

Get-DeliveryOptimizationStatus will give you shiny info too. Of interest is the FileID, Priority, and Status. Remember I said earlier that the client will cache content? Check here, it’s happening on my unmanaged home PC.

And you can use Windows Analytics to get insights on DO statistics. There’s a great post about getting started here.

Hopefully this information is enough to get you started on a fun DO journey. At its very least, it’s fun statistics you can share with friends or family over dinner tonight. As a reminder, we have a lot of information on our blog about DO, all you need to do is search for it.