I just fired up the capacity planning tool that’s all the rage these days. 

I found it easy to use and quickly modeled a client environment I worked on this past summer.

With some trepidation, I pressed the final OK button and it recommended something that is pretty similar to what we gave our client (we actually threw in a second application server for future excel use).  I take that to be a good sign and increases my confidence in the tool.

It seems pretty powerful stuff a much better starting point than a blank page.

I like that lets you get into some good detail about the environment.  How many users, how you project they will use the system (publishing, collaboration, etc), branch office and connectivity / network capacity between them and the mama server.  Good stuff.

It asks broad based questions and then lets you tweak the details for a pretty granular model of your environment.

I hesitated downloading it because I have so many other things to look at it, read and try to digest.  I’m glad I did.

It’s an easy two-step process.  Download system center capacity planner and then download the SharePoint models.  It runs nicely on Windows XP.

Based on my quick impression, I don’t see how it might account for:

• Search: Total documents, maybe types of documents, languages.
• Excel server: how much, if at all?
• Forms server: how much, if at all?
• BDC: how much, if at all.

Those may be modeled and I just didn’t see them in the 10 minute review.

I will definitely use it at my next client.

If I were not a consultant and instead working for a real company :), I’d model my current environment and see how the tool’s recommended model matches up against reality.  That would be pretty neat.  It could lead to some good infrastructure discussion.

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My client recently installed a magic device from Juniper that apparently replaced their old Cisco network load balancer (NLB).  At about the same time, we installed a hotfix to address a workflow problem.

A day or two later, we noticed a problem when we accessed the shared service provider (SSP).  We could get to it, but we would be challenged for a user ID and password many times on each page.  This didn’t happen with the main portal app, nor central administration.  Naturally, we didn’t know which of the two (Juniper or hotfix) would be the issue, though I strongly suspected the hotfix, figuring we had not installed it quite right.

It turned out that Juniper had some kind of compression setting.  One of the robed figures over in the network group turned that setting off.  That solved our problem.

This is not the first time that compression has been the root cause of a SharePoint problem for me.  IIS compression adversely affected a 3rd party tool from the good people at The Dot Net Factory for IE 6 browsers (IE 7 browsers worked without difficulty).

So, add "compression" to the hazards list.

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Credit to: http://www.elfwood.com/art/s/h/sherry/death_colour.jpg.html