Capacity Planning
Capacity planning provides a solid foundation for planning and managing the computing environment. When you determine the computing resources needed to meet your business requirements, you gain the following benefits:
Service objectives are met.
Productivity is improved.
Scalability is developed and maintained.
Total cost of ownership (TCO) is controlled or reduced.
One of the most important tasks in capacity planning is to construct a representative baseline for the workload and the computing resources. Capacity planners and business planners must work together to identify the components of the business that are dependent on computing resources and to forecast the workload demands. Asset management is key to performing hardware inventory. If you need to replace hardware, look carefully at what needs to be replaced before upgrading.
Some organizations rely on the expertise of managers for capacity planning, others use analytic modeling, simulation, benchmarking, or, in critical situations, actual experimentation in their capacity planning. No matter what techniques you use, successful management of the computing environment requires a proactive approach.
A good starting point is to profile the different activities that take place on your network or subnets per hour, day, and month, like the following:
Number of password changes.
Number of times users log on.
Number of DNS queries.
Number of machine account password changes.
Then, determine the minimum, maximum, and average for each of the above items. You want to know how many of these events take place, how much bandwidth they take on the net and how much processing power and disk space they use on the server.
Find out how much these same entities exhibit on the new product. You can then use this information to optimize your servers and to plan your domain and site structure.
For more information about capacity planning and Windows 2000 features, see the chapters in this book relevant to the technologies for which you are planning.