System Center Capacity Planner 2006 now available
The chaps in the Windows and Enterprise management division have certainly been busy with names. We've had RepMan, CapMan and now CapPlan is now available to download. Thats System Center Reporting Manager, Capacity manager and now Capacity Planner... It's an open beta release, but you have the opportunity to provide direct feedback through the discussion forums.
I had to go and read up a bit more about Capacity planner as the original internal announcement passed me by. It allows you to model and plan your MOM and Exchange 2003 deployments and brings the option of what-if analysis that if you plans change you can run the model again. You can perform different types of what-if scenarios:
• Proactive performance planning: Helping an organization meet their service level goals consistently, now and in the future.
• Infrastructure planning and optimization: Plan for IT purchases to optimize cost.
• Help to ensure success of Microsoft Exchange 2003 and MOM 2005 deployments: Use to plan correct amount of infrastructure needed for a new application to meet service level goals.
• Performance analysis and predictive reporting: Automatically report performance trends and bottlenecks to manage current and future performance issues.
System Center Capacity Planner 2006 (Beta) is designed to help you create a system architecture model for deploying a Microsoft server application, such as Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 or MOM 2005. A typical system architecture model consists of the following information:
• Topology: Site locations, types of networks, network components, and network characteristics (bandwidth, latency)
• Hardware: Server distribution and characteristics, server and network mapping
• Software: Server role and service mapping, file and storage device mapping
• Usage profiles: Site usage and client usage
After you create a model, you can run a simulation that provides a summary and details about the performance of the application and its supporting components.
Think that this one is going to be really useful if you're planning a migration to Exchange server 2003 and want to get things right and plan for flexibility after the migration. A useful tool...