In this paper we study how distributed scheduling systems can be designed most effectively; we focus on the problem of selecting an optimal arrangement of schedulers, or a deployment, for hierarchically organized systems. We show that the optimal deployment is a complete spanning d-ary tree; this result conforms with results from the scheduling literature. More importantly, we present an approach for determining the optimal degree d for the tree. We test our approach using DIET, a network-enabled server system that uses hierarchical schedulers. Finally, we demonstrate that our approach selects deployments that are near-optimal in practice