Get Help In Upgrade Planning
Rob Kirkland
In our last tip, we discussed tools available to determine your hardware and software requirements for upgrading Domino. But it isn't always easy running the tools, or getting the information from tests other have conducted. This tip, excerpted from Domino System Administration, by Rob Kirkland, published by New Riders, discusses some other sources of help.
One problem is that the hardware manufacturers don't publish the datasets that Server.Planner needs (so you can ignore the instructions in Server.Planner to retrieve the datasets from the notesbench.org Web site--they aren't there). In fact, the only thing most of the manufacturers do publish is summary test results that show their servers in the best possible light. They use the Mail Only test script, which assumes light demand on the server by users and therefore shows the highest number of supported users for any given hardware configuration. Your users will probably make heavier use of server resources. Therefore you will never be able to support the numbers claimed in these published test summaries.
So what should you do? You have four options, listed below in order of increasing accuracy and expense:
- You can make a rough guess based on published data.
- You can discuss your needs with server hardware vendors.
- You can contract with someone to generate NotesBench data in a lab, using your predicted mix of workloads.
- You can run real-world, on-site pilot tests in your own environment.
Regarding the first option ("rough guess"), here are some things you should keep in mind:
- You can find published summary reports of NotesBench test results at www.notesbench.org, and at the Web sites of various computer manufacturers.
- Almost all the published test results will be for the Mail workload, the lightest of them all.
- As a rule of thumb for Domino 4.6 Mail workload test results, divide the highest number of users achieved in the test by 3, then (to give yourself some headroom) deduct another 25 percent from the resulting number. This should give you a rough real-world user count for the hardware configuration tested. But they multiply the number by about 1.8 to account for Domino 5's greater capacity.
To learn more about Domino System Administration, or to buy this book, click here.
