Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Estimating System Requirements
Chapter 9: Capacity Planning 211
This section helps you to estimate your system requirements so that you can choose
the appropriate hardware and farm deployment. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 can
be configured in a number of ways and can scale to suit specific needs, such as general-purpose
intranet, heavy search usage, or heavy team usage and collaboration.
To choose the appropriate design, the following needs must be considered:
■ Understand the users’ work patterns and the specific tasks they perform.
■ Obtain or estimate the size of the entire collection of documents that both
SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services will store,
including document versions, categories, and folders.
■ Estimate the internal and external site content to be crawled and indexed.
Historical access information from Web logs and third-party monitoring tools
can be used to determine current throughput rates and specific usage patterns if
there is a current intranet. However, if no intranet exists, you must make an estimate
based on a prediction as to what is required to support the overall business need.
End users see a portal site, viewing it either through a Web browser interface
or, in some cases, the Microsoft Office System client. It is inappropriate to size the
design based solely on the number of users. Base the system size and configuration
on the type of transactions (or portal site functions) and on the frequency of transactions.
The “transaction arrival rate” is called the throughput rate.
In this section, you will estimate the following factors:
■ Peak throughput for each projected key portal and site type
■ Current and future storage needs
Estimating Peak Throughput
When users browse intranets or the Internet, search for files, check out documents,
or select from a list of choices, this usually causes the display of a new page of information.
The more complex functions, such as document management, are especially
resource-intensive and can initiate the display of multiple pages of information. In
general, one user function is approximately equivalent to the display of one new
HTTP page on the user’s desktop. Therefore, throughput measurement is based on
the premise that the number of HTTP pages per second roughly equates to the number
of calculated operations per second.
To calculate the peak throughput rates your SharePoint Portal Server farm must
support, you must obtain specific business-related sizing metrics. These sizing metrics
differ depending on the type of portal site. For example, the typical user will
access the corporate portal site much less frequently than he will access his divisional
portal site or Windows SharePoint Services sites.