A Search Head is configured as a primary Deployment Server (DS) and has many clients connected to it polling for deployments. We have a failover situation where we want to introduce a standby DS that is configured identically to the primary DS. By just changing the resolved IP address of the name of the DeploymentServer referenced in deploymentclient.conf (we are not changing the name) the new DS will be contacted for the first time by all the clients. I suspect this contacting this new DS will result in all the apps and configs in etc/deployment-apps being downloaded again, presumably because the clients don’t have any deployment bundle information or signatures for the new DS. The assumption being that the deployment bundles carry some sort of host signature. The question is that once contacted does the new DS send its entire deployment bundle to all the clients? We would like find a way to prevent this.
Take a look at this similar question (though it was asked a different way): Multiple Deployment Servers Configuration
Also, here is a link to a discussion of Deployment Server in the Splunk Wiki, it may help, too: DeploymentServer