In very large environments (over 2000 hosts), Distribution Servers can be deployed within local subenvironments to ease the management operations. Distribution Servers act as management connection proxies for the managed hosts, concentrating management connections and caching binaries and configuration files for distribution.

The Distribution Servers are low-maintenance software components with no management database or user interface, and can be deployed and configured by the Management Server. You can convert a Management Agent running on a Unix host into a Distribution Server.

Two Distribution Servers can be installed as a single Distribution Point to provide redundancy, and there can be up to 5 levels of Distribution Servers between a host and the Management Server.