Forum Discussion

Simon_Butler's avatar
15 years ago

Capacity Reporting and Planning

I'm about to embark on developing a in-house solution for EV Capacity reporting and planning.  As far as I'm aware there's nothing provided by EV nor any add-on product to provide this.  (Please point anything out if there is...)

The basic output would be "How many days capacity" or "How many extra users capacity" each component of EV currently has based upon trended recent usage.  At a minimum that would include hosts, SQL, Index, Centera, Exchange Journal.

Has anyone else had a go a developing something similar?

5 Replies

  • Can you explain a little more in detail of what you need as many of us have done creative reporting on our EV environments and maybe we can offer some assistance. Especially of the end result is shared

  • Ok - Take Indexes.

    n servers, each with multiple partitions, some closed, some open, each with varying amounts of spare disk space.

    For each server I need to work out the number of days capacity remaining for Indexes based on current trended usage.   I.e. If I have 100GB left and recent trends show 1GB used per day, then I have 100 days Index capacity.

    This would be used in reverse to order further storage for the next 3 months and build storage planning.  I have 100 days, I need to ensure sufficient capacity for 6 months, therefore I order for an extra ~80 days -  80GB.

    Mailbox Archiving Indexes are probably the easiest as the change rate would be consistent.  For journaling we have live and standby servers to rotate workload.  In this case I'd need to roll the usage and capacity statistics together to get a capacity by days for journaling for a site as a whole.

    Hosts - that's also fairly easy - A host has a maximum mailbox archiving capacity e.g. 5000 mailboxes, or a maximum expected mailbox journaling ~ 12,000 mailboxes.

    SQL - That's a bit more difficult - need to take into account white space, maintenance space, disk space, t-log, DB.

    Centera - TBD

     

    Cheers,

    Si

     

     

  • For thw Windows servers to  get the stats daily why dont you just use a WMI call to the server to have it report on the details of it's disk. You can then dump that into excel and run a report against the data to extrapulate the growth and estimate the number of days remaining on the disk space.

     

    The same should go for your SQL servers disk space. Just remember that on SQL you should run regular maintenance jobs to compress the databases and free up the white space

     

    As for the mailbox and journaling are you referring to space used on disk or capacity details as seen by EV. The EV data is easially available for both of these and can be gathered by way of a SQL query

     

    I do such a report every day using a VB script to pull the WMI data from all my servers to gather the disk stats, event log details as well as the service status (stopped, running ETC.) and have it 

  • What you're saying would seem ok for a small single directory implementation, assuming the whole process is automated. 

    My requirements ae spread over 30+ journal servers and 15+ archive clusters in multiple EV Directories.  I need to develop something completely automated.

  • you could speak to an external company to dev this with you, or at least help get it off the ground. Glasshouse spring to mind and I don't work for them so its an unbiased plug.