Jonathan Hardwick : Capacity Planning

Moving on - to Developer Division Performance Engineering

jonathanh — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 04:15:26 GMT

With the release of SCCP 2007 I've now been through two complete product cycles of what started out as a little research project called "Indy" -- and that seems like more than enough!

So I've moved over to the Performance Engineering team in Microsoft's Developer Division. The division's flagship product is Visual Studio, and our blogger-in-chief is Somasegar. Within the division, the Performance Engineering team makes sure that when we ship a new release of Visual Studio, it will perform well in the hands of our customers. We've also started a performance engineering blog: now you know where to send the complaints :)

Announcing the beta release of System Center Capacity Planner 2007

jonathanh — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:17:00 GMT

We're pleased to announce the beta release of System Center Capacity Planner 2007!

SCCP 2007 provides sizing, architectural guidance and best practices for customers to plan their deployments of Operations Manager 2007 and Exchange 2007. Essentially, it can predict how much hardware you'll need for a deployment, and how that hardware will behave once one of those two applications is installed. This is a follow-on release to SCCP 2006, which provided similar guidance for MOM 2005 and Exchange 2003.

Note that the performance models of Operations Manager and Exchange in the Beta are not final, so this version should not be used for planning production deployments. What we're looking for is feedback on whether the new models and features will meet your needs for planning and modifying deployments of Operations Manager and Exchange. The beta is available now for download from Microsoft Connect -- once you've logged in, look for it on the available connections page, or just go directly to the program details.

Please get it, try it, and send us your feedback via the beta newsgroups.

And if you're at the Microsoft Management Summit this week, we will be presenting two sessions on SCCP 2007 and multiple hands-on labs -- please stop by if you're around!

Flash demo of System Center Capacity Planner

jonathanh — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 04:30:00 GMT

We’ve had these bits bouncing around for way too long, but now they’re finally linked to from the SCCP home page. So revel in the glossiness of An Introduction to Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2006 :)

More ways to learn about System Center Capacity Planner

jonathanh — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 07:57:00 GMT

The great thing about Microsoft webcasts is that they’re archived. So even if you miss the upcoming live webcast on “Implementing SCCP 2006”, you can still watch it at your leisure (well, as long as your leisure includes a broadband connection).

This also means that you can also watch all the previous webcasts about SCCP. So it seems like a good idea to have a list of them somewhere. Here’s that list:

Introducing System Center Capacity Planner 2006 (10 Nov 2005), presented by Manish Kalra. If I remember rightly I answered audience questions on this one.
System Center Capacity Planner 2006 Overview (19 Dec 2005), presented by Chris Avis.
System Center Capacity Planner 2006 Overview (8 Mar 2006), presented by Chris Henley.
Implementing System Center Capacity Planner 2006 (26 Jun 2006), presented by Chris Henley.

Upcoming webcast about System Center Capacity Planner

jonathanh — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 08:40:00 GMT

Just a quick note that in 3 weeks, Chris Henley will be hosting a public webcast about SCCP 2006. Click on the link to register - it’s free!

Implementing System Center Capacity Planner 2006
Monday, June 26, 2006 11:30 A.M.–1:00 P.M. Pacific Time
Join us and get the information and guidance you need to plan and complete a successful implementation of System Center Capacity Planner 2006.

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032299011&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

Getting back into the saddle

jonathanh — Fri, 05 May 2006 04:26:00 GMT

I’m easing back into blogging after taking 6 months off – the good news is this means I’ve got a big backlog of topics…

I’d like to start off by thanking Neil Hobson for writing a great two-part overview of System Center Capacity Planner on MSExchange.org. He gives the reader a walkthrough of our various modules, and includes a ton of screenshots, including one of our ability to export nicely-formatted data into Excel. This feature is so little-known that I don’t think even we have a screenshot of it :-) So I’ll shamelessly crib it here:

You can see down at the bottom that we don’t just give you a simple summary view of the information – we have tabs marching all the way to the right, containing (we hope) more information than you’ll ever need as you drill down into capacity planning for Exchange. One of those cool features that just doesn’t get much play.

Thanks Neil!

Where can I get System Center Capacity Planner?

jonathanh — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 08:47:00 GMT

Short answer: System Center Capacity Planner is on TechNet disc 0422, which went out this month. We’re actually “featured content” — I think this is what we get in return for exclusivity!

System Center Capacity Planner (SCCP) ships this month and is only available to TechNet Subscribers. SCCP employs state of the art modeling technology to bring unprecedented functionality and flexibility to the process of performance analysis and planning of Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 deployments. With SCCP the IT Professional will get the guidance required to plan a deployment in the most efficient manner, while also allowing for “what-if” analysis for future planning. Find it on TechNet disc 0422.

If you want to take a look at SCCP 2006 before paying for that all-important TechNet subscription, Chris Avis has done a couple of webcasts. He’s even posted demo sessions that didn’t fit into the webcasts as WMV files on his blog. Awesome stuff.

If you want to try-before-you-buy, and you happen to be in the Irvine area, then Kurt Shintaku is running another series of hands-on management labs right now. He’s covering a lot in three days, but hopefully he hasn’t reached SCCP yet :)

And big thanks to Microsofties Jeff Alexander, Dave Northey, and Tony Soper for driving traffic our way. I really like Tony’s analysis of “people who downloaded the SCCP 2006 beta also downloaded”, because it shows that our customer know exactly what they want. The top three hits are the existing MOM and SMS sizers and the WSSRA reference architecture (which includes capacity planning information).

System Center Capacity Planner 2006: SHIPPED

jonathanh — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 00:19:00 GMT

The Indy team just handed over our final bits for System Center Capacity Planner 2006. Barring any last-minute mishaps or recall-class bugs – memorably defined by our test manager as “causing the death or permanent disfigurement of small furry animals” – there’ll be an official RTM email later this week, and then all you lucky TechNet subscribers will receive it in January.

In the meantime we’re all walking around looking a little dazed and happy, because it’s been a heck of a ride. One of our devs worked out that we’ve done eight date-driven releases in eight months, which might be expected for a Web 2.0 startup but is kind of unusual in a server division…

What I think is really amazing and worthy of pride is the fact that we took a couple of crazy guys from Microsoft Research, built a v1.0 product team from scratch, created a never-been-done-before application – and only slipped by 6 weeks from our original plan 18 months ago.

So a big and heartfelt personal thankyou to everyone who made this product possible. You know who you are. Thanks guys :)

I’ve got lots of other blogging topics to catch up on over the next few weeks, but I’ll try to throw in some SCCP news as well. Next up in that category will be some walkthroughs of the tool showing what you can do with it.

System Center Capacity Planner at Exchange Connections

jonathanh — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 01:21:00 GMT

I’m helping out on the SCCP booth at Exchange Connections in San Diego this week, and we’re handing out hundreds of CDs with our beta refresh bits. To give feedback after trying it out, you should be able to pull down the help menu and see a little “Community Forum” link, that would take you straight here.

Only, uhhh, the link isn’t there. Somewhere ’twixt vision and spec our all-singing all-dancing set of community features got dropped, and we decided to “just link to the forum”. Unfortunately, we then forgot to spec the link to the forum. Major oops. This is really painful for us, since it makes it much harder to users to discover how to give feedback.

For future conferences we’ll be slapping a big ol’ sticker on the CD sleeve with the URL on it, but for everyone at Exchange Connections I can only offer my apologies. Hopefully this blog post will show up pretty near the top of search results for “SCCP Exchange Connections”, and we’ll help at least a couple more people find this URL: http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=128

Why we've posted a beta refresh of System Center Capacity Planner

jonathanh — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 19:36:00 GMT

A week ago we updated the public beta of System Center Capacity Planner. This “beta refresh” of SCCP is now dependent on the release candidate of .NET Framework 2.0, instead of being dependent on their beta 2 release.

Shipping this refresh took a lot of effort from the SCCP team, and causes extra confusion for our users. So why did we do it? The answer is that it’s the price of taking a dependence on .NET 2.0 when they were in the middle of their development cycle. Although their beta 2 had a “go live” license (i.e., they considered it good enough for production purposes), the .NET team still wanted to move their customers onto RC and RTM as soon as possible after they were released. So we agreed to replace our original SCCP beta – which requires NET beta 2 – once they had RC bits to give us.

That’s the downside, and it’s pretty much an inevitable one as soon as you take a dependency on any other team or feature: rule #1 for shipping software is to minimize the number of dependencies you take. The upside is that, by taking advantage of the new features in .NET 2.0, we’ve been able to ship better code, and do so more quickly. Overall, we think this is a net win. And we still love managed code :)

Oh, and even though it was “just” a refresh, we managed to sneak in a few new features:

Improved support for modeling VPN connected users
More granular control of Exchange transaction rates
Optional exclusion of a redundant WAN link from load balancing
Improved support for users in branch office
Improvements to reporting
Improvements to the Hardware Editor
Improved online help
Modifications to the user interface text

If you have any questions, please post them here, or on the community forums, and we’ll do our best to answer them!

Feedback about the System Center Capacity Planner beta

jonathanh — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 05:22:00 GMT

Thanks to everyone who's blogged about our beta! Special kudos to Eileen Brown, Graham Chastney, Ian Blyth, and Marcus Oh for various combinations of "totally getting it", "kicking the tires", and "bugging us to do more", but I also want to thank Anderson Patricio, Bernd Kruczek, Blake Handler, Duncan McAlynn, Guilherme Carnevale, Jeff Alexander, John Westworth, Josh Jacob, Michael Korp, the MS Exchange Blog, Rod Trent, Stefan Stranger, Stéphane Papp, Steve Carbone, and Tim Mintner. Phew. I'm challenging our marketing team to learn French, German, and Portugese to get all the translations right :)

Want to find out more? Download the bits – which will install .NET Framework Beta 2 if you don't already have it – then talk to us in the community forum. Or tune in for our first webcast, Introducing System Center Capacity Planner, on November 10th.

Oh, and we've had our first appearance on a spam blog for careers in the modeling industry. That would be the other modeling industry…

New name, half the fat

jonathanh — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 01:16:00 GMT

The eagle-eyed will have noticed that the name of our product has changed from System Center Capacity Manager 2006 Express Edition — which is a classic example of a Type 2 Microsoft product name — to System Center Capacity Planner 2006 — which is still a type 2 name, but thankfully easier to say in one breath.

SCCP is actually the name that the development team wanted from the start, so I'm happy. In my opinion, marketing had a strong argument for beginning the name with "System Center" (we're part of that brand), but weak arguments for calling it a capacity manager (focus groups may indeed prefer managing to planning, but our v1 is all about planning), and for tacking on "Express Edition" (since we hadn't announced a "standard edition").

Anyway, the dev team has now changed all our code, documentation, web sites, distribution lists, and bitmaps, but I'm going to leave it to marketing to explain to the field why they have to use the new name. "You break it, you fix it" :)

Oh, and remember how I tried to spread the "just remember CapMan" meme? Uh, yeah, sorry about that...

Announcing the public beta of System Center Capacity Planner

jonathanh — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 03:02:00 GMT

Marketing fluff follows. This is my baby. Grab the bits and kick the tires. Then tell us what to change :)

System Center Capacity Planner 2006 Beta release is now available

We are proud to announce public availably of the latest addition to the Microsoft System Center family of management products.

System Center Capacity Planner 2006 (Beta) delivers state of the art easy-to-use modeling technology to bring unprecedented functionality and flexibility to the process of performance analysis and planning of system deployments of Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and Operations Manager 2005 by providing the IT professional with the tools and guidance required to architect a deployment in the most efficient manner, while facilitating future planning by allowing for "what-if" analysis.

Customers and System Integrators can create green-field deployment plans for Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Operations Manager 2005. Capacity Planner prescribes a System Architecture Model based on best practices, and explains the model in terms of topology, hardware configuration and software configuration. Simulation is run on the System Architecture Model to provide rich reports on utilization and end-to-end latency. A graphical editing surface allows customization of the model and experimentation with what-if scenarios to alleviate performance bottlenecks and improve end-user experience. A hardware editor allows creation and customization of computer systems at the level of processor and storage devices.

This Beta is for evaluation use only and is shared to enable our customers and partners to become more familiar with the product and provide valuable feedback to ensure we deliver a winning product to the market.

We look forward to receive valuable feedback on this new product. Please encourage your Customers/Partners to download the product, work with it, and openly share their thoughts with us

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

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

To learn more about System Center Capacity Planner 2006 you can visit: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/systemcenter/evaluation/capacity/default.mspx

Sincerely,

The System Center Capacity Planner Product Team

Being in two places at once at the MVP Summit

jonathanh — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 02:09:00 GMT

Just a quick note to say that, like many other product teams, we'll be at the MVP Summit here in Redmond this week. Specifically, we’ll be showing off the latest builds of System Center Capacity Manager to the Windows Server System MVPs at the RedWest cafeteria tomorrow night. This is all official with booths and speaker slots and presentation slides — the whole 9 yards. Oh, and we’ll have goodies to give out! Come find us :)

There was a slight panic when I spotted the subtle flaw in this plan — specifically, that we also wanted to show off to the Exchange MVPs, who’ll be in the building 25 cafeteria at that time. Ooops. So a big thankyou to Jeff Mealiffe from the Exchange team, who’s offered to show our stuff in his presentation on Friday afternoon. Unofficially. So if you see me there, don’t tell the organizers, ok? Shhhhh…

When a Microsoft blogger stops blogging...

jonathanh — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 08:54:00 GMT

In the days leading up to a major US military operation, there's supposed to always be a noticable spike in pizza orders from the Pentagon. This is a classic example of information leakage via a side channel — and one shared by Microsoft. Put another way: if your favorite Microsoft blogger stops blogging for a while, there's a pretty good chance that they're putting all their energy into an internal project instead. One with a big, fat, looming deadline.

The Indy team just went through one of these experiences, and it pretty much wiped us out, which is why I was so quiet in July. Looking back, we were crazy to have even set the deadline in the first place: we took on a project normally left to teams who are much bigger and more established than our little startup, and we completed it in just a few weeks (with a lot of help from a few good friends — thanks guys!). So, the bad news is that we're probably insane, but the good news is that System Center Capacity Manager is going to be much better as a result. And now that it's all over I've got a whole heap of blog entries churning around and ready to go. Look for more regular updates in the future.

If you want to surreptitiously track our next insane deadline, you'll need an inside line on the burrito orders from Ooba's in Redmond, WA. I can recommend the steak.

And no, we didn't invade anything.