MMS 2006 - breakout sessions

System Center Capacity Planner 2006

WOW - that's clever.

This is our prescribed method for deploying both MOM 2005 and Exchange 2003.  Future releases will include guidance for SQL, SharePoint, Active Directory and others.

SCCP offers best practice, prescriptive architecture and hardware recommendations.  It offers guidance for your deployment and provides the ability do do what-if scenarios, to let you make informed decisions to better make trade offs.  It offers (SDM) model based solutions for:

Pre-deployment sizing

Capacity Planning

Bottleneck Analysis

Hardware Configuration

Architectural Assesment

User Scenarions

We completely understand how our products use CPU, Storage and Network (i.e. we have models for both Computers and SANs) - we don't deal with Memory (altough we do give guidance), tape, network switches & routers, specialised devices (such as SSL accelerators).

The models we have for applications (MOM & Exchange) understand Actions, Devices,  Transactions, Services & Servers.

Basically you get to input your hardware, users, sites, etc and then model usage scenarios.  We then let you know exactly how that will perform (with amazing accuracy) - you can save your outputs to both Visio and Excel if desired.

This is a very specialised skill set - not many people in the industry can do this (ours was initially developed by Microsoft Research).  SCCP is free to MSDN & TechNet subscribers.

You do need to know a lot about either MOM or Exchange, so this doesn't do it all for you - but it is an excellent tool to let you determine how your implementation will run on different hardware models.

On its own it comes accross as a very good product.  Alongside everything else we're doing it becomes amazing.

Dave.