Office SharePoint Server 2007 Capacity Model now shipping

System Center Capacity Planner 2007 has shipped, now with two New SharePoint deployment models!

• Office SharePoint Server 2007 Capacity Model
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Capacity Model

By supplying information such as...

• number o users
• internet vs. intranet,
• distribution between anonymous vs. authenticated users
• usage profiles (Light <-> Heavy publishing, Light <-> Heavy collaboration)

...you get planning help and high level guidance regarding topology and hardware requirements. You can analyze how your deployment may be impacted by a merger or other scenarios and variabels.

This tool simplifies the hardware acquisition and address some of the early number of server licensing type questions. Note artificial limits have been placed in the tool to limit it at 100,000 users and 3 TB. Above these limits, Microsoft recommend MCS or experienced Architects be consulted. Even up to these limits it's recommended to consult with experienced architects and consultants to validate the recommendations from the tool. Also, check out the HP capacity planning tool to validate these results.

I took the tool for a spin. For a single-site minimum topology for a light publishing/light collaboration internet site with 50% anonymous and 50% authenticated users, the following spec is recommended:

Topology
Sites with servers: 1
Sites with clients only: 0
Total number of clients: 1

Site: Mini
Number of users: 1
Number of servers: 4
Number of SAN connections: 0

Server: Index Server
Processor: 2-processor, 2,40 GHz, Opteron (2-chip x 1-core)
Minimum memory: 8,0 GB
Disk: DiskArray 1\Volume 1 (File System), 144 GB RAID 5 (3 x 72,00 GB SCSI 10 000 RPM)
NIC: 1 x 1 000 Mb/s
Roles: Index

Server: SQL Server
Processor: 2-processor, 2,40 GHz, Opteron (2-chip x 1-core)
Minimum memory: 16,0 GB
Disk: DiskArray 1\Volume 1 (Log Files), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146,00 GB SCSI 15 000 RPM)
DiskArray 1\Volume 2 (Data Files), 584 GB RAID 10 (8 x 146,00 GB SCSI 15 000 RPM)
NIC: 1 x 1 000 Mb/s
Roles: SQL Server

Server: Web Front End 1
Processor: 2-processor, 2,40 GHz, Opteron (2-chip x 1-core)
Minimum memory: 8,0 GB
Disk: DiskArray 1\Volume 1 (File System), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146,00 GB SCSI 10 000 RPM)
DiskArray 1\Volume 2 (File System), 144 GB RAID 5 (3 x 72,00 GB SCSI 10 000 RPM)
NIC: 1 x 1 000 Mb/s
Roles: Web Front End; Query Server

Server: Web Front End 2
Processor: 2-processor, 2,40 GHz, Opteron (2-chip x 1-core)
Minimum memory: 8,0 GB
Disk: DiskArray 1\Volume 1 (File System), 146 GB RAID 1 (2 x 146,00 GB SCSI 10 000 RPM)
DiskArray 1\Volume 2 (File System), 144 GB RAID 5 (3 x 72,00 GB SCSI 10 000 RPM)
NIC: 1 x 1 000 Mb/s
Roles: Web Front End; Query Server

Personally, I think this seems a bit much... I mean isn't 4 double-processor servers as a minimum startup configuration a bit steep? It obviously depends on your availability requirements, but if You can skip the redundancy, You should be fine with 2 servers (one web and one database).

© Copyright 2008, Tomas Elfving