SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool E...

SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool Executive Overview

Published: November 9, 2007 | Updated: February 1, 2008

Planning a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) installation or a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) installation for a large enterprise can be a very complex undertaking. Determining the most cost-effective topology, hardware, and bandwidth requirements is not a trivial task and involves selecting from a variety of configuration options. In choosing the option that best fits your organization’s needs, you need to answer the following questions:

What is the minimum hardware you need to deploy?
Where and how should you deploy the hardware?
How can you optimize your deployment to meet your organization’s requirements for availability and performance?
How will growing capacity needs affect the topology?

The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool, now available as a free download on the Microsoft Download Center, helps you effectively answer these questions, and helps you balance your organization’s needs for capacity and performance with its need to keep costs under control. This new tool extends Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2007 so that you can use Capacity Planner’s analysis and simulation features to plan your WSS or MOSS deployment.

The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool is a general-purpose modeling tool that complements SharePoint’s deployment planning documentation. With this tool and the analysis it provides, you can get a head start on planning your SharePoint topology. After you provide the tool with basic information about your organization, the tool provides a first approximation of the topology your organization needs.

Important The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool can be considered for planning physical topologies with the understanding that it is both limited by the input it considers and possible lack of key architectural considerations unique to any deployment. No capacity planning exercise is complete without the involvement of experienced architects, systems integrators, and/or engineers for deployments greater than one server or 2000 users.

In particular, this tool does not consider extranet topologies, authentication methods other than NTLM and Anonymous, Forms, Excel Services, BDC, and other system dependencies outside the core infrastructure. The tool does not model high-end scenarios such as multi-terabyte Web applications or multiple Web applications. You should consult with knowledgeable architects and engineers about information architecture, database sizing, number of databases, site collection sizing and structuring, and other logical structures.

Business Scenarios

You can use the SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool to help you with business scenarios such as these:

I need to determine whether I need 10 servers or 1 server to meet the needs of my large law firm of 1000 users.
Should I buy 10 server CALs or 5? I’m not sure where to start.
I’m confused by the capacity planning documentation; I want a tool where I could enter a few inputs to get me started.
I don’t want to have to hire a consultant to tell me I can handle my small 200-person deployment with a single server, but I can’t determine that from the available product documentation.
I’ve used the Hewlett-Packard capacity planning tool and I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do, but I would like a more platform-agnostic view.
My deployment is blocked until I can determine what kind of topology would provide my organization with basic high availability.

Using the SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool

The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool walks you through the following sequence of steps in the planning process:

Use the Model Wizard to assess your organization’s needs and create your initial topology.
Use the Model Editor and the Hardware Editor to review and edit your topology.
Run simulations, and use the detailed simulation results to review the behavior of your topology.
Return to the Model Editor and the Hardware Editor to optimize your topology, and then re-run the simulation to check your results.
Finalize your topology and generate reports to guide the deployment process.

The following figure illustrates the general process, and a more detailed description follows.

1. Assess Your Organization’s Needs and Create Your Initial Topology

Use the Model Wizard to set up your initial topology. Configure your primary topology (the SharePoint (WSS) or SharePoint (MOSS) farm), any branch topologies (Branch Offices), and any network or hardware stipulations. Also configure user profiles and expected application requirements, including requirements for availability and storage capacity.

This topology is your starting point. When you finish the Model Wizard, the SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool evaluates the information you have provided and builds a detailed model of your topology.

2. Review and Edit Your Topology

Use the Model Editor and the Hardware Editor to check that the initial topology meets your expectations, and refine the model if appropriate. You can then run a simulation to see how the topology behaves.

3. Use Simulations to Verify Your Topology’s Behavior

The simulator function of the SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool evaluates how your topology performs under the loads and traffic you anticipate (as specified by your user profiles and application requirements). Use the results of the simulation to identify areas where your topology needs to be adjusted (for example, to identify bottlenecks or servers that are under- or over-utilized).

The simulator’s predictions and analysis are based on laboratory testing at Microsoft. For more information about this testing and the resulting data, see the documentation for the tool.

4. Optimize Your Topology

When you have identified issues with your topology, return to the Model Editor and the Hardware Editor to make changes. Then re-run the simulation to verify the impact of your changes. Using this process, you can improve your topology’s performance and efficiency before you deploy any actual hardware.

5. Finalize the Topology

When you are satisfied that the model topology meets your organization’s needs, export the details of the topology to use as guides during deployment. You can export a Visio diagram of the topology and Excel spreadsheets of the topology information, including a detailed spreadsheet that you can use as a bill of materials.

Download Details

The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool is a software extension of the System Center Capacity Planner 2007. Installing the SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool adds application models for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007.

To access the System Center Capacity Planner 2007 download, click here.

To access the SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool download package, including a reference document that discloses detailed information about the construction of the models, click here.