Microsoft’s Dynamic Systems Initiative intends to give us a new way to design, deploy and manage infrastructure so intelligence is used at every stop in the journey. Intelligence is gathered from MS, from us and from the network in question. The first part of the proces is modelling, i.e. simulating what we are going to create.
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.
I’ve used the beta version of this for modelling Exchange 2007. It was a bit clunky to use but it did a good job at giving me an idea of how I needed to scale the architecture.
System Center Capacity Planner 2007 is a pre-deployment capacity planning and post-deployment change analysis solution that provides best-practice guidance and hardware-specific knowledge to help information technology professionals make solid architecture decisions when planning a new deployment or changes to an existing deployment for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and other Microsoft server products as add-in application models become available. Before installing System Center Capacity Planner 2007, please consult the Release Notes.
Feature Bullet Summary:
- Simple installation and setup
- Built-in knowledge of Exchange Server 2007
- Add-in knowledge for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007, Microsoft Windows® SharePoint Services 3.0, and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, coming soon
- Recommended topology in a Graphical User Interface
- Export topology to Visio and server configuration to Excel
- Model server performance and end-user response time
- Hardware library includes popular configurations
- Create custom hardware