| Other workspace management tasks must be addressed as well, though the urgency or frequency may vary. These include tasks like addressing workspace capacity planning, modifying workspace settings, managing Web discussions, managing subscriptions, setting version maximums, and more. While many issues exist relevant to managing capacity, or capacity planning , the assumption here is that capacity planning is performed once a productive SharePoint Portal Server is in place ”it is an ongoing process. Prior to this go-live point in time, capacity planning is usually termed "sizing," and includes all of the work and planning around characterizing the users and content of a Portal deployment. Good capacity planning includes continually monitoring the use of each server to ensure that the overall user experience ”such as response time ”is acceptable. In the next few chapters, we address capacity planning in terms of growing vertically (adding more data/content to workspaces, for example), and growing horizontally (adding more and perhaps diverse workspaces). Many considerations surround capacity planning, including -
Adding local content increases SharePoint Portal Server disk space requirements, as does enabling document management features such as support for document versioning. -
Adding content increases the time required to propagate indexes. At some point in this process, it must be determined at what size an index becomes too large to propagate efficiently . -
Adding workspaces to a single server increases the server work load, due primarily to increased user activity. Thus, it becomes critical to characterize typical user activity so as to extrapolate the number of active users that a particular server configuration may support. -
Depending upon the role that the SharePoint Portal Server fulfills for a particular organization, future local delta requirements for hardware resources like disk space, network, and CPU must be accounted for. -
Again, depending upon the role or activity, incremental SharePoint Portal Server machines may need to be added to the production solution. This could include servers dedicated to index workspaces, crawling, and so on. Single Server Capacity Planning Many companies deploy their entire production SharePoint Portal server environment using a single server. While this is a fine approach in many cases, consider the following limitations and constraints and subsequent impact to managing the associated workspaces: -
A single server can track and store one million document versions. Thus, choices such as category hierarchy, versioning, and so on must be managed well so as not to exceed this number. -
A single server can host 3.5 million documents in an index. That is, a single-server SharePoint Portal Server deployment can crawl 3.5 million documents. The activity associated with searching indexes or crawling content may therefore preclude using the server for much of anything else. -
Each server supports a maximum of 10,000 licensed users. In some cases, this number might actually be reached in a single server deployment, though in most cases additional servers are added before this license number becomes an issue. -
Geographic requirements may dictate a distributed approach rather than a single-server "central" approach. Multiple Server Capacity Planning Most companies benefit from multiple production SharePoint Portal Server machines for reasons like the following: -
Users distributed geographically may suffer unacceptable network latency times in single-server configurations. -
Different organizations within the same company may have different portal business needs or goals, such as enterprise search, document sharing, document management, team collaboration, the need for an enterprise-wide "master" portal tied in to other "departmental" portals within the company, and so on. -
Different organizations within the same company will certainly have different functional goals ”that is, the needs of the marketing organization will differ greatly from the needs of the product support organization or the sales group . Monitoring Performance Counters Much in the way of performance monitoring tools is available to technical support organizations tasked with supporting Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. A key tool, however, is Microsoft's own Performance Monitor, or PerfMon.  To find out more about the precise PerfMon counters that may be used for monitoring SharePoint Portal Server, see "Monitoring Using Standard Performance Counters," p. 136., and "Performance Counters," p. 508.  |
