There’s been a running thread on the MDT/OSD email discussion list that started in July 2012 about the SMSCACHESIZE setting not working within an OS deployment task sequence for ConfigMgr 2012. In ConfigMgr 2007, you could use the SMSCACHESIZE setting to bump up the client’s cache size during the OS deployment. In ConfigMgr 2012, that’s no longer the case. No matter what size you set the cache using the parameter, it will always set the client’s cache size to the default, which is 5120 MB.
The Microsoft documentation for ConfigMgr 2012 says this:
SMSCACHESIZE -
Specifies the size of the client cache folder in megabyte (MB) or as a percentage when used with the PERCENTDISKSPACE or PERCENTFREEDISKSPACE property. If this property is not set, the folder defaults to a maximum size of 5120 MB.
If a new package that must be downloaded would cause the folder to exceed the maximum size, and if the folder cannotbe purged to make sufficient space available, the package download fails, and the program or application will not run.
This setting is ignored when you upgrade an existing client and when the client downloads software updates.
Example: CCMSetup.exe SMSCACHESIZE=100
Note
If you use the SMSCACHESIZE or SMSCACHEFLAGS installation properties to set the cache size to be less than the default value of 5120MB, these properties will be ignored and the cache folder size will be set to 5120MB.
The Word
Trond Kartensen put in a call to Microsoft. Here’s what came of it:
After 2 months of thinking MS confirms the behavior and the famous words ‘by design’ is what I get J
The product documentation (updated 01.10.2012) about the SMSCACHESIZE property:
This setting is ignored when you upgrade an existing client and when the client downloads software updates.
This is OS deployment (so really not an upgrade), but because the sccm client is included in the image (standard build & capture), they call this an upgrade of the client when I deploy that image (standard deploy TS with captured image).
It’s an easy workaround to run a script later in the TS to change the cachesize, but I think it is strange that they changed this behavior from 2007 to 2012.
