System Center Capacity Planner 2007 - A nice point to kick-off IT Infrastructure planning and design for MOSS 2007

System Center Capacity Planner 2007 - A nice point to kick-off IT Infrastructure planning and design for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007).

Recently, I have been trying and exploring number of best practices to design and plan IT Infrastructure especially for BizTalk and SharePoint Portal Server implementation. In my exploration drive I come across a very nice tool called System Center Capacity Planner 2007. Here in the post I would like to focus just on MOSS 2007.

The tool allows you to plan hardware, servers and service across organization, different location, etc. There nice demo and help already available inside tool itself so would not like to paste here but there are some snapshot, I would like to post along with the blog post.

You can download the tool from below link. http://www.microsoft.com/downloadS/details.aspx?familyid=DBEE0227-D4F7-48F8-85F0-E71493B2FD87&displaylang=en

The tool also provides nice wizard to start planning. Have a look to some below snapshots for designs and reports.

1. Global Topology View

I tried to build organization's global topology. Where server farm is located in one continental and that is connected to various offices, branches across the glob. To evaluate such need for implementation, hardware design, scale out processes for services, service and load balance distributions are tricky and time consuming. System Center Planner 2007 perfect tool for such analysis and design. It simulate load and provide stats which could be very helpful for such design and planning.

2. Site Topology View.

3. Server Role Configuration, to design scale out topology it's very important. Also help while making decision to buy new hardware and scale up/out planning.

4. User Profiles which are role based and component base. Allows tool to predict more accurately.

5. Simulation Report.

Tool generate rich statistics in report, where you can estimate with such number of users and dependent on their role, latency in network what will be longest transactions, I/O utilization, Highest CPU Utilization, Bottleneck analysis, Highest storage space utilization, connectivity utilization, etc. It also generate different stats for all servers, clients, SANs, WANs and Thresholds.

Please send your views and feedback at nilayparikh@gmail.com

Thanks.