Questions[bits](server)

I am attempting to transfer about a million files of various sizes from one server to another, and due to various size, network and time constraints, I'm attempting to use BITS in PowerShell to do the file transfer.

I am not able to compress the directory before sending due to time constraints and limited access to the receiving server.

It appears that there's an (undocumented?) limitation of 60 asynchronous BITS transfers going at once in PowerShell.

After 60 jobs start, I get:

Start-BitsTransfer : Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
At line:1 char:14
+ $jobs = $s | Start-BitsTransfer -TransferType Upload -Asynchronous
+              ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [Start-BitsTransfer], NullReferenceException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : System.NullReferenceException,Microsoft.BackgroundIntelligentTransfer.Management.NewBits
   TransferCommand

The PowerShell script is:

$s = Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Select-Object -Property @{Name = "Source"; Expression = {$_.Fullname}}, @{Name = "Destination"; Expression = {$_.Fullname.Replace("C:\folder\", "\\server\c$\folder\")}}
$jobs = $s | Start-BitsTransfer -TransferType Upload -Asynchronous

I am able to run this synchronously, and I am able to transfer individual files asynchronously without issue.

Is there anyway to do transfer about a million files asychronously with PowerShell as efficiently as possible?

As you know, WSUS use BITS for downloading its updates. Unfortunately BITS downloads these updates in background and use remained bandwidth of server. This is not desirable in my situation that want to get all update rapidly. I want to force BITS to download WSUS updates in foreground (instead of background). Is there any chance?

We are upgrading our PCs to Windows 10 and are running into a few problems with updates.

OUR SETUP:

We have 2 sites based in the UK (Norwich & Preston) and we have a WSUS server in our Norwich site. Once we approve updates, the wsus server downloads the updates and pushes them out to all PCs in Norwich & Preston. We have this setup via group policy.

We have a dedicated 20mbps connection in Norwich and a dedicated 5mbps connection in Preston (as Preston has fewer staff).

We did initially have some Issues with WSUS sending updates to Preston which was flooding our connection. We Enabled BITS to limit the traffic during working hours. This worked fine with Win7 but we are having problems with Win10.

THE PROBLEM:

We are still seeing the Preston network flood when updates are being applied. This appears to be on Win10 machines. I can see the network being flooded and I can also see the updated being downloaded onto the win10 machines. When the updates finish the network drops fro 100% usage down to 40%.

During a recent update I applied the BITS setting manually to the local group policy (as it said 'not not configured') and I could see an improvement on the network.

QUESTIONS:

1 - Group Policy is applied on the domain server. Should the local group policy on each PC show the changed made? As stated above, all our machines say that the BITS setting is 'not configured' but we are confident that it is fine with our Win7 PCs

2 - How can I test that BITS is working how it should

3 - Is there a known problem with BITS on Windows 10

I'm trying to use Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter to connect to an old laptop and create a VM from it, but it needs BITS compact server installed and I can only find how to install this on windows server platforms, not Windows 10. Is this possible, is so how?

(I've attempted to use Disk2VHD on the laptop itself, to a variety of USB 3.0 drives and a network share, but I continually get "semaphore timeout period has expired" so I'm looking for another method of creating a VM)

I am trying to run some P2V conversions using SCVMM 2012 Release Candidate. The source machines are Windows Server 2008 SP2 hosts in a local network. The destination is a Hyper-V 2008 R2 SP1. Unfortunately, the conversion is rather slow - I get around 3-6 MB/s for the data transfer. I suspect BITS for slowing things down, but have not figured out the definite root cause yet.

Edit: The type of conversion seems not to matter much - I see similar results for offline and online conversions. After starting four parallel conversions the Hyper-V performance graph for disk write throughput (MB/s, red line) against idle time (percentage, blue line) looks like this:

The spikes in the write throughput graph tell me that something is pausing the data transfer every other second. Also, since it would just look too artificial to have four source machines pause sending synchronously, I suspect the Hyper-V or SCVMM side of things to cause the slowdown.

Any ideas on how to speed things up?