Eileen Brown (how does she have the time to do so many bloggs?) has blogged about the System Center Capacity Planner which was picked up by Stefan Stranger (some good MOM articles on his blog). This is a beta release that you can download and play with. It was originally going to be called Capacity Manager (System Center is the new Microsoft brand for all things management). When it is released it should be available as part of the Technet subscription from what I have been told.

The reason for the change is that Capacity Manager is going to be the tool that will enable data to be drawn from the System Center data warehouse and start to analyse what is going on based on real data. This version is more of sizing spreadsheet on steroids. The feedback we gave to the Product Group is that it should be a different name especially as this version will be practically free whereas Capacity Manager will be charged for. A number of us customer facing people told the product group that giving v1 for free and then charging for v2 will cause problems. Hence the name change.

People mainly talk about it for the Exchange modelling and planning (which is actually very impressive) but all MOM people out there should have a look at it to help model a MOM 2005 system.

I went through and modelled a MOM system with a number of servers at a head office and 50 branch offices each with a DC. As always the US assume everyone has great big pipes. There are a few server configurations that you can chose but there is the ability to create your own server configuration. I found going through quickly and creating a model the easiest and going back later to edit usage profiles etc. I am sure with a bit more practice I will find the best way to use it. I think it may get very confusing to edit it afterwards if you have many sites though. It make take a few iterations of going through the tool to get it right.

What I found nice is the way it displays the information (looks like it is using the new MMC v3 design) and when you run the simulation it shows you if there are any bottlenecks. I especially liked the WAN usage figure which everyone always asks about with MOM. And you can play with the types of management packs and the amount of alerts to see how that affects the system.

The Performance and Sizing white paper gives a background on how MOM was tested to get the supportability numbers and the Sizing spreadsheet is a good starting point for designing a MOM system. It is a rule of thumb and should not be taken as gospel as my good friend Gordon McKenna says. This tool makes it much easier for people to look at the impact of MOM and the topology although it does not help you to come up with a “best” design from what I have seen so far. So people will still need knowledge and experience to design a MOM system. It should, however, help highlight bottlenecks and so should be part of the toolkit for every MOM consultant.

The Beta is available for download at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B68C06A5-8949-4A3F-9685-21228DBE8A0E&displaylang=en

Customers/Partners can provide feedback at: http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=128

System Center Capacity Planner 2006 web site. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/systemcenter/evaluation/capacity/default.mspx

By the way it requires the .Net v2 beta to be installed.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7ABD8C8F-287E-4C7E-9A4A-A4ECFF40FC8E&displaylang=en

And if you have the original .Net v2 beta (as I had) you have to uninstall it before the beta v2 will install.