Appendix A - Planning an Operations Manager 2007 Deployment with Capacity Planner 2007
Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2007 helps you make decisions concerning the topology and hardware selection for your deployment of Operations Manager 2007. The Capacity Planner Model Wizard guides you through the initial phase of creating an Operations Manager capacity model. After you complete the wizard, you can review and copy the list of recommended hardware. You can also export detailed information about the hardware to Microsoft Excel.
You can download Capacity Planner 2007 from the Capacity Planner Web site System Center Capacity Planner 2007. To size an Operations Manager 2007 management group, you also need the Operations Manager capacity model.
Before you begin, you need a general idea about how many servers and other computers you want to monitor that are in the domain and others you want to monitor that are separated from your management servers by a Kerberos V5 trust boundary. In this scenario, assume our management group is a multiple server, single management group that includes the following:
The Contoso domain that includes 1000 agent-monitored computers. Computers in the Contoso domain are Exchange Server 2007-based servers, Windows Server 2003-based servers that manage Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) domain controllers, client desktop computers, and Operations Manager 2007 servers.
The Treyresearch domain that includes 250 agent-monitored computers running custom applications. There are no trust relationships established between the Treyresearch domain and the Contoso domain.
Using the Model Wizard
The following procedure outlines using the Model Wizard to size an Operations Manager 2007 management group.
To use the Model Wizard
Start Capacity Planner 2007 and ensure that System Center Operations Manager 2007 is shown in the Capacity Models list, then click Create a new Capacity Model.
On the Management Group page, click Add Management Group.
Type Contoso in the Management Group Name box. Contoso has 1000 local clients, so type 1000 in the Local Managed Device Count box. These are the agent-managed-computers that belong in this domain.
Modify the managed device profiles for Contoso and update the percentage of devices, if necessary. You can update the profiles for the computers running the following:
Windows XP Client Desktop
Windows Server 2003
Exchange Server 2003
SQL Server 2005
Windows Server 2003 IIS Server
Active Directory 2003 Server
Click OK and then click Next.
The Remote Sites page allows you to define different types of branch locations that need to be monitored by your management group that are in an untrusted domain. A gateway is automatically placed in every remote site. In this example, we have one remote site consisting of the Treyresearch domain with 250 desktops running custom customer relationship management and human resources applications that will be monitored by custom management packs written for Operations Manager 2007.
Click Add Remote Site Profile and then type the following information:
Type Treyresearch for Remote Site Profile Name.
Type 250 for Local Managed Device Count.
Type 1 for Site Count.
Type 100 for Windows XP Client Desktop.
Type 0 for all other profiles, click OK, and then click Next.
On the Networks page, review the connectivity between the main site and remote sites. Leave the default values for the connectivity specifications, and then click Next.
On the Hardware page you can enter your preferences for server CPUs and disk configurations, or leave default values. You can change hardware configurations after you complete the wizard. For this scenario use the default values and then click Next.
On the Application page you enter information about your specific Operations Manager 2007 deployment. For this scenario, make the following choices:
For the Do you want to enable Operations Manager Reporting option, click Yes to add a reporting server to the management group.
For the Will you be collection security events by enabling Audit Collection (ACS) option, click Yes to add an ACS database server and an ACS collection server to the management group.
For the Do you want to consolidate server roles where possible option, click No to ensure that each server role resides on its own server.
For the Do you want to add additional server components for increased fault tolerance option, click Yes to ensure that clusters are created for each individual server component that can be clustered.
For the Additional Management Server option, click Yes to create a redundant management server. Note that this option is not referring to clustering, it simply places an additional management server into the management group to allow for agent or gateway failover.
For the Clustered Root Management Server option, click Yes to create a failover cluster.
For the Clustered Operations Manager database option, click Yes to create a failover cluster.
For the Clustered Reporting data warehouse option, click Yes to create a failover cluster for the Reporting data warehouse.
For the Clustered ACS database option, click Yes to create a failover cluster for the ACS database server and then click Next.
Review the Model Summary page recommendation.
This page displays the Operations Manager 2007 server roles, supporting hardware, and network infrastructure needed for your management group. You can click Copy to clipboard if you want to paste the information into other applications. This information is a comprehensive list of all server hardware and software components in the management group. You can use the information from the summary to help you estimate hardware costs needed to purchase hardware for the deployment.
Click Finish to proceed to the Model Editor where you can modify the management group, if needed.
By using the Model Wizard, you can quickly size an Operations Manager deployment to your needs. Based on your input in the Model Wizard, Capacity Planner recommends standardized hardware for the modeled Operations Manager 2007 infrastructure.
For more information, see Capacity Planner Help.
Using the Model Summary
After you have completed the Model Wizard and copied information from the Model Summary page, you can paste the information to another application. For example, you can paste the information into Microsoft Excel and add estimated costs per server, or even per device and then perform simple add operations to quickly estimate a total deployment cost.
Running a Simulation and Exporting Results
In the Model Editor, you can run a simulation to simulate the performance of your Operations Manager 2007 hardware components. You must run a simulation before you can export any simulation results. Using exported simulation results to Microsoft Excel, you can view detailed information about users, servers, hardware components, transaction latencies, and device and WAN utilization. To view your deployment topology, you can export it to Microsoft Visio. After you have run the simulation, you can export results of the simulation from the File menu.