How many iOS devices per Configuration Profile?

[tryckman]

We are a medium sized school district who is about to see our managed iOS device count double from approximately 5000 to 10,000 devices. I am curious about how to best manage configuration profiles. Am I safe pushing a configuration profile to 10,000 devices or would it be better to break profiles up based on site. For instance, should I have one WiFi profile for all devices or should I create a WiFi profile on a per site basis?

I hope my question makes sense.

Thanks.

[NowAllTheTime]

If you know that all of your sites will remain centrally managed and identical in config for the foreseeable future, then you can use individual profiles across all devices. If at any point device management may be delegated site to site, and/or the configurations for network/security/etc. at each site will be different then you may as well break your profiles up by site now.

The spec for APNS and configuration profiles can handle those numbers via a single profile - so technically there is no issue with doing that. It really just comes down whether you want to break things up operationally across sites or keep things uniform. Talking with whoever manages the wifi networks and security policies across your sites will give you a good pulse check on the method you should adopt.

[tryckman]

Thanks Jason, I appreciate the advice. I manage our entire network environment infrastructure and was more concerned about the JSS's ability to successfully push configs to so many devices in a timely manner. I would really like to keep things simple so the fewer config files to manage the better. Yes, we will be managing everything centrally so it sounds like we can get away with not breaking things up by site.

Thanks again.

[NowAllTheTime]

Yeah, you should be fine then, the only caveat is that the more clients you have the less 'instant' the APNS service is since there are only so many open connections to your JSS at once. It's usually not much of a difference, but you may want to check in with your Jamf rep to ask if whatever server you have hosting your JSS will become a bottleneck (if you've got a cloud hosted JSS then that's not as much of a concern).

Sounds like you've got a lot on your plate, so I can understand the desire to streamline!

[blackholemac]

Definitely budget the CJA class if possible . Getting the server-side scaled right for such a large addition is critical. Honestly it took me a while to get it right for 5000 iOS devices ( and like all of us I've still got a lot to learn ).