How to calculate SharePoint capacity planning?

Question

How do we calculate the capacity planning for SharePoint handling an Internet Presence site. What will be the server topology? How many WFE and so on?

If for instance if we need to identify the server hits 300,000 hits as peak traffic and 15% more on the subsequent years.

How do we arrive at the best server topology?

Answer 1

I seem to rememeber reading somewhere that you were not allow to publish SharePoint performence metrics. So the only place I know that has this kind on info is msdn.

I referenced this page a lot for sp2007:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261795(office.12).aspx

And the tool:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=dbee0227-d4f7-48f8-85f0-e71493b2fd87&displaylang=en

But for 2010, i think you have to use:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff758652.aspx

Answer 2

There are no hard rules you can follow as they will be different in every enviroment.

Topology is based on your requirements. Technet some diagrams for some basic deploment methodologies: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263199.aspx

You need to determine your fault tolerance requirements in combination with your performance requirements to really determine the optimum configurations.

Some Variables affecting performance: Bandwidth CPU Memmory Cache Proxies Services utilized in farm Web Apps App Pools

There are some guidlines in the capacity guides http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff608068.aspx , but they are just to get you started. MS may say 10000 users per WFE with 16GB Ram, but that may be lower if you increase your cache sizes and consume more memmory, or higher if you add more RAM, or minimze the services you are using. From a performance standpoint you will really need to do some testing.

The SharePoint Administration toolkit has visual studio module you can use for load testing. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc508851.aspx

Run that and monitor the counters here and you will start to get to the numbers you can rely on. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff758658.aspx

The good thing about SharePoint is it is very scalable. If you notice your WFE's are overloaded, spin antoher one up and add it to the farm (assuming load balanced), same for any of the services, if Search is not accetable, determine the bottle neck and add query, crawl, or even dedicated db servers.