14 DAY TRIAL // Once it had made available the Release Candidate of its File Server Capacity Tool, Microsoft was on the fast track to provide the gold development milestone of the solution. The RC Build of FSCT was offered to testers in the first half of July 2009, and just two months later, the Redmond company released version 1.0 to manufacturing. The first finalized version of the tool designed to simulate CIFS/SMB/SMB2 client requests is currently up for grabs via the Microsoft Download Center, for free. Jose Barreto, Microsoft principal program manager, explained that the software giant considered both file server capacity planning and performance troubleshooting as key details associated with high-level network administration. In order to streamline the processes of hardware assessment and performance evaluation Microsoft is offering File Server Capacity Tool 1.0.
“Central file servers and distributed client workstations are now the norm in most corporate networks. This structure reduces storage capacity requirements, centralizes backup, increases the availability of files, and simplifies the document revision and review process. However, because data storage and access are centralized, performance limitations impact the entire network population. Accurately projecting the number of users that hardware can support under a specific workload, and understanding when and where bottlenecks occur, are critical to making efficient improvements to the server configuration,” Barreto noted.
The first RTM version of the File Server Capacity Tool was launched officially on September 15th, 2009, by Jian Yan and Bartosz Nyczkowski at SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara, CA. The solution was offered for test driving in RC stage in July 2009. At that time, Microsoft allowed access to a limited pool of testers via Connect. This is no longer the case, as the tool is available for all customers who need to evaluate their server infrastructure. The software giant indicated that the tool came with support for systems: Windows 7; Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2003 R2 (32-Bit x86); Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 editions; Windows Server 2008; Windows Server 2008 R2; Windows Vista.
“File server capacity planning tools can be valuable in choosing new hardware for purchase, identifying the capacity of existing hardware, locating existing bottlenecks, and planning for resource expansion in advance of resource exhaustion. The throughput capacity of a file server can be expressed either as the maximum number of operations per second or a maximum number of users supported by the configuration. These values are influenced by several factors, some of which include processor speed, available memory, disk speed, network throughput and latency, and the speed with which SMB requests are processed,” Barreto added.
File Server Capacity Tool is available for download here.