I thought it would nice to put something out there that can help someone who’s looking to either deploy, re-deploy and migrate contents from a database that has grown too large.
When planning SharePoint deployment it’s always good to have a clear picture of where your site is going so that you can make the necessary arrangement to put it under control. Microsoft has a good documentation on Architecture to help you answer the hard questions, but how, when and where do you start on capacity planning?
Some of the things to put in mind during the planning phase include:
1. Maximum size of a list and list containers, the recommendation is to not have more than 2,000 items at a given level. The maximum number of items supported in a list with recursive folders is up to 5 million items.
2. Maximum database size per site collection equates to about 200GB which is driven as per the SLA on your database recovery time.
3. A maximum of 20 SSP’s with 4 as best practice for your SharePoint farm to reduce the administration procedures.
4. MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 do not support the /3GB switch to address the application’s memory allocation.
5. 32-bit vs 64-bit hardware – If you are budgeting for hardware be sure to budget for X64-bit to get better performance for your application. Also future releases of SharePoint will be based on X64-bit hardware.
So how do you determine the required number of servers for
n number of users? Microsoft released a free download of System Center Capacity Planner 2007 (SCCP) originally an Exchange Server Deployment tool but now can be used for SharePoint Farm Architecture with addition of SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.0 Models
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/capacity-planner.aspx .
To simulate the load, you can use Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite.
As best practice, test your farm architecture prior to deploying it to production environment.