System Center Capacity Planning Tool for SharePoint

This week, one of our infrastructure architects asked me to create a MOSS capacity planning model for one of his customers. I was aware that we had released a System Center Capacity Planning Tool add-in for MOSS, but was completely surprised to find that you can download this tool and the add-in completely free from Microsoft. It does not require a System Center deployment. I ran everything on my laptop. If you haven't seen it, this tool is quite good. It allows you to specify things like: your central and branch offices, users with usage profiles, WAN details, your supported server configurations, and the standard types of disks you use for machines. After you complete the wizard, it builds the model for you. The tool also allows you to run simulations against the model to look for potential bottlenecks, CPU spikes, full disks, WAN utilization, etc. And it will even output nice Visio diagrams for you. So much for telling your boss you slaved over them. One area I was suprised to see missing, was the ability to specify how much content outside of MOSS I would be indexing. For exmple, if I was going to index my 2 TB of file server content, that would have a big impact on disks in the environment. That option may be there, but I haen't found it yet. You can get these tools at the following Urls. Again, you need both the Capacity Planning Tool, and then the SharePoint specific modeler.