| When planning for maximum capacity, it is important to determine the business requirements for how SharePoint Portal Server will be used within your environment. SharePoint Portal Server administrators should not only plan for the current state requirements; future state requirements should also be considered . In previous chapters, we learned that SharePoint Portal Server is a flexible and efficient solution that can provide centralized portal services to thousands of users across your enterprise. Chapter 5 provided an overview of indexing and searching content. Once content sources are established, SharePoint Portal Server crawls, or reads through, content to create an index of the content. After the indexes are created, you can then use SharePoint Portal Server to search for desired content across your enterprise. Decisions must be made as to whether a single SharePoint Portal Server will be sufficient to perform all tasks, including indexing and searching. While it is possible for one server to perform all tasks, the performance might not be acceptable, and you will likely consider distributing the tasks across multiple servers. Another consideration is to deploy SharePoint Portal Server across multiple sites to reduce the performance impact to the network. In this chapter, we will discuss some of the technical considerations for capacity planning within your SharePoint Portal Server environment. CPU, network, and storage costs are closely linked to specific server- related tasks. It is important to plan the configuration that provides an optimal user experience, while understanding how to monitor key resources and add additional components as the demand of the server increases . There are many issues to consider, such as -
What is the total number of concurrent expected users for SharePoint Portal Server? What is the maximum user activity your server can support? -
What is the expected number of users that will be using document management features? How many documents do you expect to maintain? -
How many users will use SharePoint Portal Server primarily for searching? -
How many workspaces do you expect to maintain on a single server? NOTE Having more than 15 workspaces per server is not recommended. Adding workspaces to a single server may cause unacceptable server load and user performance due to increased user activity.
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When is an index too large for efficient propagation? Excessive amounts of documents within an index will take longer for the index to propagate to a dedicated search server. -
How much storage will be required? If document versioning activity is high, hard disk space is consumed at a fairly rapid pace. -
Is it necessary to consider multiple servers, while dedicating individual servers to specific tasks? If multiple content sources will be enabled, you should consider dedicating one server for searching, while another server is dedicated to creating and updating indexes. -
What content will need to be crawled and included in the index? For example, you may want to crawl file servers, external Web sites, Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000 servers, Lotus Notes databases, and other SharePoint Portal Servers. |
