By Kimmo Forss

Introduction

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies facilitate easy, connected collaboration throughout an organization. By using the combined collaboration features of Microsoft Window SharePoint Services and the enterprise portal site capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, organizations can enable users to create and manage their own rich and easy-to-build SharePoint sites — and then enable the entire organization to organize, discover, and profit from these sites.

To be effective, portal site deployments must respond to a challenging set of requirements, including ease of deployment and management, service availability and throughput, and organizational flexibility. These requirements typically evolve with time and vary greatly depending on the size and complexity of the organization. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 successfully addresses these challenges by:

• Using Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 for outstanding extensibility and performance
• Supporting a multiple-server architecture for high availability, scalability, and flexibility
• Supporting tight integration of multiple server farms to address organizational and security requirements

With a well-trained staff and a large budget, it is possible to keep a Web site running at top performance. With more realistic budgets, however, you must balance hardware costs with site performance. Capacity planning is the process of matching a usage load on a Web site to the minimum server hardware required to support that load. The goal of capacity planning is to ensure that your solution can support transactional throughput targets with acceptable response times while reducing the cost of site ownership.

Accurate capacity planning estimates must consider numerous factors, including number of users, site-specific usage patterns, and server loads. However, this information is seldom known in advance, and few administrators have time to conduct a detailed analysis of these patterns. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to provide capacity planning guidelines for a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 installation. It describes the main issues you encounter and the decisions you must make when determining the optimal SharePoint Portal Server 2003 deployment for your organization. It also provides hardware configuration recommendations for server farm and single-server deployments.

Who Should Read This Paper?

This paper is intended for IT professionals who are planning a new SharePoint Portal Server 2003 deployment. For additional information about planning and deploying SharePoint Portal Server 2003 solutions, see the Microsoft Solution Accelerator for Intranets

What Are Recommendations Based On?

The recommendations in this paper are based on experiences from early deployments and intensive lab testing. The performance of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 has been evaluated on a variety of hardware configurations, including multiprocessor single servers and server farms. These tests were conducted on well-maintained, preconfigured, installed systems using the default functionality and Web Parts.