At this stage of the pre-deployment scenario, you have gathered your infrastructure planning information and installed Capacity Planner. Next, you run Capacity Planner. After reviewing the Welcome page and ensuring that you have selected an application to model, you start the Capacity Planner Model Wizard.

To complete the Model Wizard and produce an initial capacity model, do the following:

  1. On the Mailbox Sites page, enter central site information. For Exchange Server, you specify information about Exchange Server client types to create a Mailbox site profile. If necessary, you can add additional Mailbox sites. You can customize the usage profiles to specify how Exchange Server clients interact with their Exchange server and the amount of background load that affects Mailbox servers.

  2. On the Client-only Sites page, enter branch site information. For Exchange Server, you specify information about client types and number of clients to create a client-only site profile. If necessary, you can add additional client-only sites. You can customize the usage profiles to specify how Exchange Server clients interact with their Exchange server and the amount of background load that affects Mailbox servers.

  3. On the Networks page, enter network information, specifying the type of networks that connect Mailbox sites to each other, how client-only sites connect to Mailbox sites, and the utilized bandwidth between Mailbox to Mailbox and Mailbox to client-only sites.

  4. On the Hardware page, enter your hardware preferences based on processor type and disk configuration.

  5. On the Application page, enter your application-specific preferences.

  6. On the Model Summary page, view the hardware summary that is recommended by Capacity Planner. You can copy Model Summary results to the clipboard.

Based on the information that you have entered about the sites and network, the number of clients, the monitored computers or Exchange Server client types, and the hardware to use, Capacity Planner recommends a hardware and software architecture in the form of a capacity model. As you review this recommendation, you can accept or modify it.

The recommended capacity model made by Capacity Planner is the starting point for customizing the model based on your organization's characteristics. Not all aspects of your organization's architecture are considered in the recommendation. You should carefully review the deployment documentation for the application you are modeling while considering other aspects of the planned architecture, such as security.

The capacity model may not yet adequately reflect the hardware that you plan to use if your Mailbox sites and client-only sites require additional customization. To refine your capacity model to more accurately reflect your organization's characteristics, you must add details to the capacity model by using the Model Editor and the Hardware Editor. For example, you might plan to use specific server hardware that is not defined in Capacity Planner.

See Also