Announcing the Beta Release of the SharePoint Capacity Planning tool.

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) which allow you to explore the necessary infrastructure based on usage requirements. This tool uses the System Center Capacity Planner 2007 (SCCP) as an engine to provide for data collection, visualization, simulation and report writing. The tool can be used in pre-sales and feasibility study of a deployment project to give you a rough estimate of hardware requirements.

Typical business scenarios addressed by the tool: I don’t know if I need 10 Servers or 1 server to meet the needs of my large law firm of 1000 users. Should I buy 10 Server CALs or 5? I know I need something to get started, but not sure where to start. I’m confused by the capacity planning documentation; I wish I just had a tool I could put in a few inputs to get me started. I don’t want to have to hire a consultant to tell me I can handle my small 200 person deployment with a single server, but I can’t figure it out on my own based on available product documentation. I’ve used the HP capacity planning tool and I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do, but I would like a more platform agnostic view. My deployment is blocked until I can figure out what kind of topology I should be running to get basic high availability The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 collects the unique usage requirements of a particular SharePoint deployment by having the IT-Pro answer a series of questions about expected usage and operating conditions. The Capacity Planner then generates a recommended baseline topology and hardware configuration which can be modified through the SCCP model editor. Finally the tool can run simulations against the selected hardware configuration and generate estimated server loads and user experience reports. Click here for a project Executive Overview. Follow the three simple steps below to try it out

https://connect.microsoft.com/programdetails.aspx?ProgramDetailsID=1602