BITS – More Flexible Bandwidth Limit Policies

Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) has introduced a more granular control over the BITS bandwidth usage for background jobs, with a new set of group policies. Bandwidth limits can now be applied to the three BITS job priorities individually, hence providing a way of allocating more bandwidth to higher priority jobs.

A concept of time based schedules is presented, splitting the day into two schedules, namely, “Working Schedule” and “Non-Working Schedule”. These two schedules are complement of each other. Another schedule called the “Maintenance Schedule” is also supported. The bandwidth limits defined during Maintenance Schedule pre-empt Working and Non-Working schedule bandwidth limits. Within each time based schedule, bandwidth limits can individually assigned per job priority.

· Priority based bandwidth control allows higher priority jobs to use more bandwidth, but still imposing a limit on it.

· Time based schedules allow jobs to automatically switch their bandwidth usage when schedule changes, say from Working Schedule to Non-Working Schedule.

· Bandwidth limits can be ignored for jobs, if the source and destination are on the same subnet, using a setting in the group policy.

· Bandwidth limits can be set in kbps, mbps and unlimited units, per job priority level.

· Schedules are defined as a continuous time slot; say Monday – Friday – 8 am to 5 pm.

These group policies are available under:

Local Computer Policy -> Administrative Templates -> Network -> Background Intelligent Transfer Service

Hope this helps!

Aditya Patwardhan [MSFT]