Capacity Planning - Single Farm for the Global Enterprise

Overview

I recently downloaded a copy of System Center Capacity Planner 2007 (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sccp/bb969059.aspx). To use this tool you need both the planner and the SharePoint Model. I wanted to compare how a single SharePoint Farm model would play out in this tool when you consider all the services that a global SharePoint implementation has. I would rarely recommend a single farm for an enterprise because most likely it would create a Farm of Unfortunate Proportions.


Steps:

After installation Start the tool and select SharePoint Server 2007:



You will notice with a SharePoint farm deployment you can only select one Usage profile. This is consistent with SharePoint Best Practices and although large enterprises have multiple usage profiles we will continue as if there is just one.

At the Branch offices we get a little more flexibility. These users will be added to the total farm users, to keep a consistent pattern of 20000, I acutally went back to the first screen and changed the local count to 5000 users.



This is the most current chipset and disk model we are using:


I selected High Availability for the Web Front Ends, but not the SQL Server because I think anything we do will be in a Hyper-V Cluster anyway.



You will notice that the SharePoint Model Maximum is 2 TB of data, my own experience is that this is the maximum for a SQL Instance.

Results
“
Topology
Sites with servers: 1
Sites with clients only: 3
Total number of clients: 20000

Site: One Farm
Number of users: 5000
Number of servers: 6
Number of SAN connections: 0

Server: Index Server
Processor: 8-processor, 2.67 GHz, Xeon 5300-Series (2-chip x 4-core)
Minimum memory: 8.0 GB
Disk: DiskArray 1\Volume 1 (File System), 792 GB RAID 5 (12 x 72.00 GB SAS 15,000 RPM)
NIC: 1 x 1,000 Mb/s
Roles: Index

Server: SQL Server 1
Processor: 8-processor, 2.67 GHz, Xeon 5300-Series (2-chip x 4-core)
Minimum memory: 16.0 GB
Disk: DiskArray 1\Volume 1 (Log Files), 216 GB RAID 10 (6 x 72.00 GB SAS 15,000 RPM)
DiskArray 1\Volume 2 (Data Files), 1728 GB RAID 10 (48 x 72.00 GB SAS 15,000 RPM)
NIC: 1 x 1,000 Mb/s
Roles: SQL Server

Server: SQL Server 2
Processor: 8-processor, 2.67 GHz, Xeon 5300-Series (2-chip x 4-core)
Minimum memory: 16.0 GB
Disk: DiskArray 1\Volume 1 (Log Files), 216 GB RAID 10 (6 x 72.00 GB SAS 15,000 RPM)
DiskArray 1\Volume 2 (Data Files), 1728 GB RAID 10 (48 x 72.00 GB SAS 15,000 RPM)
NIC: 1 x 1,000 Mb/s
Roles: SQL Server

Server: SQL Server 3
Processor: 8-processor, 2.67 GHz, Xeon 5300-Series (2-chip x 4-core)
Minimum memory: 16.0 GB
Disk: DiskArray 1\Volume 1 (Log Files), 216 GB RAID 10 (6 x 72.00 GB SAS 15,000 RPM)
DiskArray 1\Volume 2 (Data Files), 1728 GB RAID 10 (48 x 72.00 GB SAS 15,000 RPM)
NIC: 1 x 1,000 Mb/s
Roles: SQL Server

Server: Web Front End 1
Processor: 8-processor, 2.67 GHz, Xeon 5300-Series (2-chip x 4-core)
Minimum memory: 8.0 GB
Disk: DiskArray 1\Volume 1 (File System), 144 GB RAID 10 (4 x 72.00 GB SAS 15,000 RPM)
DiskArray 1\Volume 2 (File System), 792 GB RAID 5 (12 x 72.00 GB SAS 15,000 RPM)
NIC: 1 x 1,000 Mb/s
Roles: Web Front End; Query Server

Server: Web Front End 2
Processor: 8-processor, 2.67 GHz, Xeon 5300-Series (2-chip x 4-core)
Minimum memory: 8.0 GB
Disk: DiskArray 1\Volume 1 (File System), 144 GB RAID 10 (4 x 72.00 GB SAS 15,000 RPM)
DiskArray 1\Volume 2 (File System), 792 GB RAID 5 (12 x 72.00 GB SAS 15,000 RPM)
NIC: 1 x 1,000 Mb/s
Roles: Web Front End; Query Server
“

Diagram Result:


The Total Storage the Capacity tool recommended was 8.5TB for 2TB of content. The Capacity planner also recommended breaking out the content into 3 separate SQL Servers.