Pre-Deployment Sizing Made Easy: Exchange 2003 Case Study

摘要

Estimating the necessary hardware resources and the architecture of a Microsoft Exchange messaging infrastructure is a complex and demanding process. Typically consultants rely on past experience and conjectures to recommend a deployment architecture that meets the customer requirements. Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner (SCCP) eliminates this guesswork by guiding users through the process of sizing and architecting future deployments of highly geo-scaled distributed applications such as Exchange 2003. Users can fine tune recommendations by changing the workload characteristics or hardware configurations with the use of a graphical topology editor. A sophisticated simulation engine predicts the hardware utilizations and transaction latencies which allows the user to troubleshoot potential performance bottlenecks. This paper will give an overview of the technology and present the process used to validate SCCP's accuracy of predictions.