SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool - Solution Accelerator

Are you planning a SharePoint installation for a customer? Chances are, you have a lot of questions.

• What is the necessary hardware investment?
• What kind of topology is needed to meet organizational requirements for availability and performance?
• How will additional users from a recent merger affect deployment?
  

When planning a new SharePoint deployment, you will need a way to quickly characterize the general topology and minimum hardware requirements to support expected usage loads with adequate performance. You will need a way to explore plausible scenarios and get pointed in the right direction. The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool gives you a quick way to draft topology and equipment sizing for your particular scenario and usage profile.

This solution reduces “SharePoint sizing” estimation efforts from a matter of days to a matter of hours.
 

Description of the Tool

Imagine a tool that you could use to input a few key facts about users, user needs, business requirements, and organizational resources in order to:

• Build a topology model based on this input
• Run simulations that show the impact of this topology
• Generate a summary report that will help you evaluate alternatives
  

The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool consists of System Center Capacity Planner 2007 (SCCP) models for:

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS)
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS)

The tool can be used in pre-sales and feasibility studies of a deployment project to give you a rough estimate of hardware requirements. The tool can generate estimated performance metrics based on a simulation and provide useful Visio schematics of the proposed deployment to be included in documents and proposals.

Overview 
The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool is a set of free models of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). The two models use the analysis and simulation features of System Center Capacity Planner 2007 (SCCP) to help you explore suitable IT infrastructure options for your SharePoint deployment, based on the SharePoint usage requirements for your organization that you provide to the tool. It can give you a head start on planning your SharePoint topology by producing a first approximation of the topology your organization needs. Architects, systems integrators, and deployment engineers will find it to be a valuable starting point for further refinements of the topology.

Feature Bullet Summary

·         Simple installation and setup

·         Built-in knowledge of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
·         Built-in knowledge of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
·         Recommended topology in a Graphical User Interface
·         Export topology to Visio and server configuration to Excel
·         Create custom hardware

Download Details.

Customers can obtain the SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool on Microsoft Download. For a short introduction to the tool and its usage, please go to this TechNet overview page: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=93030

This Solution Accelerator needs SCCP 2007 to be installed first.

For details and download information for SCCP, please see Additional Resources.

This Solution Accelerator is being included in Microsoft Services readiness material for SharePoint architecture and planning.

 
Additional Resources

SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool on Microsoft Download Center

System Center Capacity Planner

Solution Accelerators on TechNet  Tags: Sharepoint capacity planning