So.. you are an IT Manager and you have been presented with a SharePoint server topology based on a capacity planning exercise performed by your team. To review a physical topology and capacity plan, you should be able to understand the various SharePoint components, Logical and Information architecture, Hardware and Storage components, SQL server and so forth. This blog provides some useful links as well as information to help you get started.
Planning for Capacity
Before you embark on the SharePoint capacity planning journey, most importantly your Infrastructure team need to PLAN for capacity. Make sure your team follows these guidelines while planning for capacity
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262971.aspx
Understanding Server Roles
Understand the role of each server in a farm. The most common roles in a SharePoint farm are Web Front End, Query Server, Index Server, Web Front End for crawling and SQL Server.
http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/12/03/sharepoint-server-topology-server-roles-and-services-on-server.aspx
SharePoint Farms, Supported Topologies
Understand various server topologies which are supported for a SharePoint farm
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262870(TechNet.10).aspx
Understanding Storage Architecture
For successful SharePoint capacity planning a good understanding of storage architecture and how it relates to SharePoint workloads are important. An understanding of different storage options, RAID levels, Clusters, SAN vs DAS etc are beneficial.
From a SQL server perspective you should also understand the different SQL workloads and the impact of each on performance. Based on the size of the content, it is recommended to split up different workloads such as TempDB, SearchDB, Transaction Logs and Content database to separate disk arrays. These links provide some good information on this subject.
http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewat/archive/2007/11/18/sharepoint-and-storage.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/09/12/sharepoint-disk-allocation-and-disk-i-o.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/physdbstor.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/workingwithtempdb.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/bestpractice/pdpliobp.mspx
Understanding Network Bandwidth and Geo Distributed farms
While capacity planning a SharePoint farm its important to understand the network latencies and bandwidth for the farm. Here are some links to calculate Bandwith Requirements. Based on the number of users and bandwidth requirements you may need to choose a geo distributed topology or a centralized farm topology. For storing offline content you can look at using Groove or Outlook. Review WAN accelerators to increase WAN performance
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262952.aspx
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointportaladmin/HA100906131033.aspx
Understanding and Planning for High Availability, Backup and Recovery
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/02/18/advanced-sharepoint-videos-and-whitepapers.aspx ( Check out Backup, Restore, High Availability and Disaster Recovery)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263044(TechNet.10).aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/03/09/sharepoint-backup-restore-high-availability-and-disaster-recovery.aspx
Understanding Searching/ Indexing
Searching is extremely important for most portals. You would need to have a good understanding of your search requirements, while you are planning for capacity. Most importantly while planning for capacity you need to understand how much data will be indexed. While SharePoint can crawl and index Web Sites, Exchange folders, file folders BDC etc., the storage/search requirements may vary. For instance if you are indexing BDC content or large text files the index size may be larger compared to indexing Power Point files. By far in a SharePoint farm index server is the most processor intensive . So you need to provide enough processing power and memory to handle the indexing and crawling process. An Index server requires a Web Front Server which will serve the content while indexing. By default the Web Front End machines in your farm are set up to perform this task. However it may be beneficial to set up your index server as the Web Front End to perform this task, as it would avoid index server going over the network during the crawling process. The following presentations provide details about key enterprise search capabilities in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc505994.aspx
Capacity Planning Tool
The SharePoint capacity planning tool is an extension of Microsoft System center capacity planner for SharePoint. While the tool provides an excellent start, you need to consider several other factors and compare with other topologies to make a final decision on the server configurations. Here is the link to Capacity Planning tool.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb961988.aspx
Tuning SQL Server
SharePoint stores all it's content and configurations by default in SQL server. So managing SQL from a storage perspective is paramount. Here are some key recommendations and best practices to help administrators of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 plan and monitor their SQL Server storage requirements to support optimal performance and operation of their server farms.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287996.aspx
Understanding Software Boundaries
SharePoint has certain boudaries, which are documented. Some of these numbers may be a bit conservative. However you should understand the limits to determine whether your planned deployment falls within acceptable performance and capacity limits.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787.aspx
Regression Testing
Before you deploy the site, load test your SharePoint environment. Here is a link to set up your VSTS 2008 environment to load test MOSS
http://www.combined-knowledge.com/Downloads/HowToConfigStressTestProjectForMOSS07usingVS2008TS.pdf
