System Center Guide

Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner (SCCP) 2007 is a pre-deployment capacity planning and post-deployment change analysis solution for Microsoft server products, including Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007.

However, is it really all that useful? Most admins and architects that I’ve spoken with about this product feel that it’s based mostly on over-engineered capacity planning models that favor Microsoft licensing and not necessarily on providing “real world” value.

But, what if it were extensible to the 3rd party ISVs?

I was recently talking with Martin Sajkowski, Vice President of Worldwide Sales for Secure Vantage Technologies, regarding some of their new product announcements for the upcoming Microsoft Management Summit, when the topic of capacity planning came up. While they’ve produced an Excel spreadsheet for calculating approximate data storage needs, it was lacking some critical decision point factors and was in need of updating for the forthcoming product releases. When I laughing said “too bad Microsoft hasn’t made the capacity planning models for System Center Capacity Planner available to the ISVs yet” it was as if a light bulb had gone off. “What a great idea!” he replied.

Yes, it is a great idea – though I’m sure it’s not an original one. Surely someone at Microsoft must have thought this would be great idea as well. Perhaps even some of you reading this are now thinking about all the core infrastructure solutions you have to design and implement that are not from Microsoft and how nice it would be to have planning models for those apps.

Would having a common framework for planning capacity and “what if scenarios” that supported Microsoft and 3rd party apps make System Center Capacity Planner more useful? If you could obtain capacity models from Dell, IBM, EMC, Veritas, etc. would you actually install SCCP? If you could estimate the outcome of production changes before actually making them, would you do things differently?

Sound off people! I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one.

Microsoft has released the latest version of System Center Capacity Planner, SCCP 2007.  SCCP 2007 allows you to model your design of certain solutions before you even deploy them.  It gives you a rough idea how they will scale and how you need to design your architecture.  It currently supports a limited number of products but MS has promised to grow that.

Read more about the release

Download Capacity Planner 2007 

I was just looking for some contextual illustrations for Capacity Planner and noticed that there are SharePoint beta models available now. Actually, they’ve been out there for a while now, but this is one of the System Center products that I use less often. So, forgive my oversight in that regard. Anyhow, the SharePoint models, currently in beta and available from the Connect site (Live ID required), will allow you to access what the minimum hardware needed to deploy SharePoint in your environment, along with guidance on where and how such hardware should be deployed. Additionally, the models will help optimise your deployment for high availability and peak performance, as well as the “what if” scenarios to see how the SharePoint architecture will stand up to growing demands.

Installing the tool adds application models for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. Check it out.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb961988.aspx