Starting in MSP 3.3.1, there are two types of staging scopes. I am posting this to highlight the important difference between these two scopes within site objects. You should choose wisely when creating your site objects as they could have a huge impact on your MSP system.

Put simply, a local site can only be used to stage devices locally at that site alone whereas an enterprise site may be used to stage a device from any site in your enterprise. You must make the decision about which type of site it is when creating the site object. When a site is of type Local, it gets ONLY the site bundle (and corresponding content) for that site alone. However if the site is of type Enterprise, it gets the site bundle (and corresponding content) for EVERY site in your MSP system. So the amount of content that must be queued up and sent out increases exponentially with the number of Enterprise sites you have defined.

We set up a test to illustrate the magnitude of difference between defining all of the sites in MSP with local scope versus all sites with enterprise scope. The test involved the import of 5000 setting objects, 5000 relay server objects, and 5000 sites. The bulk import of settings and relay server objects finishes fairly quickly (approx 2-5 mins for each) and the work queue processing finished about as soon as the import completed. When importing the 5000 sites which used Local scope, the numbers are similar and there are approximately 80,000 records on the content queue. However, if the 5000 sites are instead set to use Enterprise scope, the processing of the work queue took around 70 hours to complete and there were more than 75 million records queued up on the content queue when it finished.

Because of the extreme difference between the two site scopes, we recommend ONLY using Enterprise sites when you absolutely must. A typical example might be if you have one or two “staging depots” where a majority of devices are initially staged before being sent out to their production locations. In this case, only the staging depot sites should be set as Enterprise scope and the rest of the sites should be local only. For more details on sites refer to the MSP 3.3.1 documentation.