Microsoft ships capacity-planning beta

Microsoft last week released the first public beta of its new capacity-planning tool for corporate IT departments and said the software is on target to ship by year-end.

System Center Capacity Planner 2006, introduced in April as Capacity Manager, is a modeling tool to help users size deployments on Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 (download the beta).

Microsoft will add a software developers kit, so third parties can develop Capacity Planner-based modeling modules for their applications, and Microsoft will use the kit to devise similar modeling capabilities for its servers, such as BizTalk and SQL Server.

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Microsoft last week released the first public beta of its new capacity-planning tool for corporate IT departments and said the software is on target to ship by year-end.

System Center Capacity Planner 2006, introduced in April as Capacity Manager, is a modeling tool to help users size deployments on Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 (download the beta).

Microsoft will add a software developers kit, so third parties can develop Capacity Planner-based modeling modules for their applications, and Microsoft will use the kit to devise similar modeling capabilities for its servers, such as BizTalk and SQL Server.

A similar tool, originally billed in April as Capacity Manager Version 2, is slated to ship in 2006 or 2007 and be released with the Capacity Manager name. It will incorporate live data from System Center Reporting Manager and MOM to gather real-time performance, inventory, implementation and usage data from production environments. In addition to pre-deployment-sizing capabilities available with Capacity Planner, Capacity Manager offers capacity and performance tracking, forecasting and guidance for enhancing existing deployment to handle application and network upgrades.

Some analysts say versions of the modeling tool released before the public beta appeared to be too simplistic.

"It is overly simple compared to the real-world modeling that you would have to do to really make a decision on how many servers you need, how big they have to be and so on. The tool's [modeling] results would be hard to trust," says Peter Pawlak, an analyst with independent research firm Directions of Microsoft. Pawlak says another concern is that the tool doesn't first inventory an existing network and then create a model of that network as a base of reference. "It should be able to go out and discover all the things that it needs to calibrate the model."

Capacity Planner and Capacity Manager are two of a number of tools in a suite of management software Microsoft is developing under the System Center brand name. The suite includes System Management Server, Microsoft Operations Manager, Reporting Services and Data Protection Manager, which is slated to ship Oct. 22.

In the broader context, System Center is one piece of Microsoft's 2-year-old strategy called the Dynamic Systems Initiative, a 10-year plan to build a comprehensive management platform for Windows.

Microsoft Research developed the Capacity Planner modeling technology, which lets users create what-if scenarios, and experiment with hardware and software configurations and user behavior before deploying anything on a live network.

Microsoft says the tool can be used for performance planning, infrastructure optimization and to size deployments so they meet service-level agreements.

Microsoft is offering similar modeling capabilities around its development tools. Rival IBM offers modeling capabilities with its Rational set of tools.

Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.