Capacity Planning SharePoint Portal Implementations
Planning Tools
Planning a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) installation or a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) installation for a large enterprise can be a very complex undertaking. Determining the most cost-effective topology, hardware, and bandwidth requirements is not a trivial task and involves selecting from a variety of configuration options. In choosing the option that best fits your organization's needs, you need to answer the following questions:
- What is the minimum hardware you need to deploy?
- Where and how should you deploy the hardware?
- How can you optimize your deployment to meet your organization's requirements for availability and performance?
- How will growing capacity needs affect the topology?
The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool, available as a free download on the Microsoft Download Center, helps you effectively answer these questions, and helps you balance your organization's needs for capacity and performance with its need to keep costs under control. This new tool extends Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2007 so that you can use Capacity Planner's analysis and simulation features to plan your WSS or MOSS deployment.
The SharePoint Capacity Planning Tool is a general-purpose modeling tool that complements SharePoint's deployment planning documentation. With this tool and the analysis it provides, you can get a head start on planning your SharePoint topology. After you provide the tool with basic information about your organization, the tool provides a first approximation of the topology your organization needs.
See TechNet for the complete discussion and Capacity Planner for details of the Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2007 tool.
"Hopefully most people know that MOSS is a superset of WSS. In other words, MOSS takes the foundation laid by WSS v3.0 and expands upon it, creating features that sit on top of it, utilize the core WSS framework, and extend it in such a way that is beneficial to larger companies, enterprise deployments, and portal scenarios. The following is a list of things that MOSS provides that WSS v3.0 does not. I figured it would be a waste of text to show the features that the two have in common, or the places in which MOSS re-uses WSS functionality without change or enhancement. ..."
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