R2 Capacity Planning tool run through and XML file problem

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I have had the distinct pleasure or misfortune to have used the LCS 2005 SP1 capacity planning tools and the unreleased OCS 2007 capacity planning tools with customers. As I loaded the tool, I forgot about some of the feedback that I provided on the toolset which is nice to see exposed. Things like being able to specify the password for users,  I am now running through the R2 Capacity Planning tool in my own small lab as we have a customer who was monitoring the load on their pool and by querying SQL they were not showing a balanced load. We don’t document a SQL query checking load but of course this does beg the question of what that query is reporting on.

I ran into a problem and amazingly I found a forum post of someone else experiencing the issue so I asked them to follow up with me so I could ensure I resolve theirs too. Even more amazing is that I looked in a forum location that isn’t supposed to exist since we migrated to the Technet location - https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/uccommunityreadiness

If you see a forum post with just social.microsoft.com then you should know that nobody is likely monitoring them and that the data should eventually be migrated: https://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ucccommunityocsdeployment/thread/86a971fc-df26-4bf6-9688-230cf6be2acc 

In my testing I found a problem in the XML generation tool. The xml file does not include the proper syntax for the password. Copy the data below and replace with your password -

<UserGlobalPassword>password</UserGlobalPassword>

Yesterday I ran the query and showed 2 endpoints which was correct but the R2 MMC reported 3 endpoints. Highlight your R2 pool in the left tree view and then select the database tab in the right hand contents pane. Hit Go on – To retrieve current user summary statistics for the selected pool, please click Go. Seeing a discrepancy with so few clients I thought I would try to put some stress through the system and see if I can get the SQL query to report one item while the SIP TLS Performance Counter shows another. I don’t seem to recall being able to run the tool on actual OCS roles but dedicated stress boxes, in the R2 version I run the tool to create users for simulation from the SQL Back End (or Front End if you choose).

I will be continuing to work with the tool, my plan is to use this through the Edge Server role and if I get enough time, I might even try it with a federated lab topology as well.

TomL LCSKID