The Capacity Planner Hardware Editor is used to view, edit, and add computer and device configurations in Capacity Planner. You can then update servers in an existing capacity model by assigning custom configurations to them. While Capacity Planner includes many predefined configurations in its library, you will most likely need to define a configuration that more closely represents hardware configurations in use or planned for use in your deployment. After you have added or modified computer or device configurations and you navigate away from the Hardware Editor, you are prompted to save your changes to the hardware library.
Capacity Planner models only the required infrastructure that impacts performance. Therefore, objects such as firewalls are not modeled by Capacity Planner or included in the Hardware Editor.
For a list of the tasks you can perform with the Capacity Planner Hardware Editor, see Capacity Planner Hardware Editor.
Capacity Planner Computer Configurations
In a Capacity Planner capacity model, computer configurations consist of at least one CPU and at least one disk. A computer configuration can also include multiple disk arrays.
Capacity Planner Device Configurations
Capacity Planner device configurations are definitions of CPUs, single disks, and disk arrays. Specifically, Capacity Planner models devices as follows:
- A CPU device can include multiple physical processors.
- A disk configuration is a single physical disk. All disk sizes
that appear in Capacity Planner are displayed in unformatted
capacity. When disks are formatted with NTFS, approximately 91% of
the disk capacity is usable.
- A disk group can contain up to 64 individual disks. A disk
group is also called a volume. RAID is applied at disk group
level.
- A disk array includes at least one disk group of previously
defined disks. Each disk array can have multiple disks, reflected
by the Disk Count column. A disk array can contain up to 16
disk groups.
 Note |
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| Capacity Planner models the utilization of the disk arrays and the utilizations of the disk groups that the arrays contain. When exporting the information to Microsoft Excel, this appears as two sets of disks.Additionally in Excel reports, bytes written per second might not appear to correspond for disk groups and a disk array because RAID is applied at the level of a disk group. For example, when using RAID-10 (RAID-1/0), x bytes are written to an array but 2x bytes are written to the disk group it contains. |