Sometime back I got a chance to work on Capacity Planning for SharePoint 2010, we did lot of analysis to come up with the right Topology and Architecture. I would like to share some of same experience here, which might help others as well.
Below would be some Topics I will cover in this
1. Capacity Planning Approach
2. Topology design and considerations
3. Storage Architecture and guidelines
SharePoint Capacity Planning is one of the Critical exercises which depend on various factors. While doing Capacity Planning there are various Questions for which we need answers.
Some of these few Questions are:
- How much hardware do we need for SharePoint Farm?
- What would be the Topology for the Farm?
- How much data can we store?
- How many users can be supported by the Farm?
- What all services do we need to start?
An answer to these is our Capacity Planning Approach. Our capacity Planning Approach should be rigorous and follow below guidelines to have effective results.
SharePoint Capacity Planning Approach should follow below steps:
- Step 1: Model
- Understand the expected workload (User base and usage characteristics)and dataset (Volume of content to be stored)
- Setting Farm Performance and Availability Targets
- Step 2: Design
- Determine starting point architecture
- Select hardware
- Step 3: Implement, Tune/Optimize (Pre-Prod)
- Create the Pre-prod environment that mimics the initial architecture
- Stress the system with synthetic load that represents the workload & Populate the storage with the dataset.
- Analyze and optimize architecture.
- Step 4: Deploy (Prod Environment)
- Deploy a new SharePoint Server farm
- Step 5: Monitor and Maintain
- Identify & Monitor performance counters for different tier servers
- Adjust farm by adding or removing hardware resources, modifying topology by adding dedicated application servers, or splitting the data between databases.
Model phase provides us details about the workload based on which we decide the hardware that is required for the Farm. This is done by understanding the current workload and planning interviews with site owners.
Below is a reference of some of the Question which should be asked. (You can also use HP sizer tool to do this)
| Category | Question | Description |
| Usage Data | Total Number of Potential users(Employees,Vendors/Partners) that could access the system? | Number of users that have access to one or more SharePoint sites, Number of Accounts in Active directory. |
| Usage Data | What is the percentage of total users that are expected to access Intranet Portal pages during a typical hour of business day ? | |
| Usage Data | Peak number of user requests per user per hour? | User Request is access to sharepoint site functions and content, these include accessing pages,searches,browsing content,opening documents. |
| Usage Data | What is the expected growth in user count over next 5 years? | Growth in users base for subsequent years. |
| Breakdown of User Activities | What will be typical user activity types? A) Higher Read Operations B) Mix of Read & write Operations C) Higher Write Operations |
For e.g. Higher read is typically Internet site. |
| Breakdown of User Activities | Expected average Page Load times for different user operations? | Average page load time is response time for the user to see a particular page |
| Application Services | Do you plan to have following services in next 6 months? Businees Intelligent Solutions Excel ,Visio and Access Services SSRS and SSAS Infopath forms Mysites, Social Tagging and Profile Pages |
|
| Application Services | Please share the information to formulate SSO design; Application Name–Authentication type–User store–User types–Inegration with existing SSO product E.g. SAP portal–Windows Authentication–AD–Intranet User–Site Minder |
|
| Usage Characteristics | What is the SharePoint Server maximum recommended Capacity? | |
| Usage Characteristics | What percentage of disk storage can be filled i.e. maximum disk fill factor? |
The Estimated space used for this storage will not exceed the specified fill factor |
| Usage Characteristics | What is the percentage of portal database size will constitute Index data? | The size of Index catalog depend on size of information being Indexed and also the sizes and types of files. |
| Usage Characteristics | What is the expected Content Quota limit for my sites database? | |
| Solution Architecture | Is there any preferred vendor list for hardware components? | |
| Usage Characteristics | Include Space for on-disk backups? | If Backup startegy included disk based backups, then that requirent can be included in the storage design. |
| Solution Architecture | What is the organization’s current network and bandwidth structure with respect to servers communication and speed? | Network Latency is the communication between the servers and bandwidth is data transmission rate between the servers |
| Solution Architecture | Are you looking for Virtulaized solutions? | |
| Availability & DR | What are the availability requirements for the solution? | Availability is the degree to which a SharePoint system is perceived by users to be available. 99% is 14.40 minutes downtime per day, 7 hours per month and 3.65 days per year. |
| Availability & DR | What is the DR strategy for existing Portals/applications? | |
| Availability & DR | What is the amount of data that the business can afford to lose in the event of a failure? (To Evaluate RPO) | |
| Availability & DR | What is the amount of time the business can afford for the site or service to be unavailable? (To Evaluate RTO) | |
| Availability & DR | What is the expected level of Recovery i.e. we should be able to recover the entire farm, Web application, site collection, site, list or library, or item.(To Evaluate RLO) | |
| Availability & DR | Do you have any Network load balancing solution for Web Front end servers in the existing environment? Do you have any specific tool to be named? | Network Load balancing helps to load the incoming traffic on the all WFE servers. |
| Availability & DR | Do you have any high availabilty strategies for existing portals? | Recommended strategies for sql database are Sql Server failover Clustering and Sql server High-availability mirroring |
| Storage & Backup | Is there an Enterprise SAN Infrastructure in place, which can be shared for the new application infrastructure? |
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| Storage & Backup | Do you have any Wan Accelarators in place with any of the current portals in place? If Yes then which one and since when you have it? | |
| Storage & Backup | What is the current consolidated Database size for Intranet Portals? | |
| Storage & Backup | What is the expected growth rate in terms of Database size? | |
| Search | How many number of items do you plan to crawl(searchable)? | |
| Search | What is the response time you expect for Search Queries? | |
| Search | Are you looking for high availability requirements for search i.e. Do you need a search solution that can survive the failure of a particular server?If Yes, we need to add redundant Query Servers & redundant Index Server | |
| Security | Which extranet topology & Reverse Proxy Server is in place for accessing extranet sites? | |
| Security | How Vendors are authenticated to existing portals /Applications and in which user store vendors data reside? |
In the Next Part we will talk about the Topology of the SharePoint Farm. Also catch at http://amandeepdua.wordpress.com for more interesting Topics