Source: Microsoft Storage Team

Version 1.0 of the File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) was announced yesterday during a presentation by Jian Yan and  Bartosz Nyczkowski at SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara, CA. The presentation covered a number of details about FSCT and included a demo running FSCT with the HomeFolders workload.

If you are not familiar with FSCT, the download page offers this overview: “File server capacity planning and performance troubleshooting are critical aspects of high-level network administration. 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. 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.”

Read more at the source.

Download x64 version of the FSCT

Download x86 version of the FSCT