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Introduction
HP has a long history of developing tools to help customers plan and design their Microsoft® application infrastructures. These include sizing and planning tools for Microsoft Exchange, Office SharePoint Server, SQL Server, and Virtual Server 2005. These sizing tools can be used to calculate the server and storage requirements and generate a bill of materials based on a set of inputs gathered during an interview process. This allows a system architect to quickly generate a baseline hardware configuration tailored to the specific customer requirements. These tools are available as free downloads from the HP ActiveAnswers website; www.hp.com/solutions/activeanswers/sizers.
Continuing this tradition, HP has released a planning tool to support Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS) deployments. Along with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft OCS 2007 is a core component of Microsoft’s Unified Communications strategy; providing instant messaging and real-time presence information, audio/video conferencing, and Enterprise Voice (voice over IP (VoIP)). The HP Architecture Planning Tool for Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 (OCS planning tool) is designed to provide a quick and easy way to generate the HP server and storage hardware recommendations based on the features and functionality required for a specific OCS 2007 topology.
This user guide provides further information on the HP Architecture Planning Tool for OCS 2007. This includes additional information on using the tool, further detail on the various input parameters and decision criteria that is driving the sizing process, and a discussion of the user profile modeling that is utilized to generate the server and storage sizing algorithms. As with any sizing and planning tool, the goal of this planning tool is to assist customers with understanding the hardware requirements required to deploy Microsoft OCS 2007. The configuration and bill of materials generated by the tool should be carefully evaluated to understand if additional hardware requirements will be needed to meet the specific customer requirements.
Tool logistics
Downloading the tool
All of the HP sizing and planning tools are available from the sizer section of HP ActiveAnswers repository at www.hp.com/solutions/activeanswers/sizers. The HP Architecture Planning Tool for Microsoft OCS 2007 can be downloaded from either the general sizer tool website, or from the Microsoft OCS 2007 specific solutions page, www.hp.com/solutions/microsoft/uc. To download the HP Architecture Planning Tool for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (and any HP sizing tools) select one of the previous links. This will open up a browser window and you will be prompted to login using your HP Passport account. To download any of the HP sizing and planning tools, a free HP Passport account is required which can be easily registered for directly from the login page.
Installing the tool
Once you have downloaded the zip file to your system, extract the file and double-click the executable to start the installation. The installation is a streamlined two-part installation as the OCS planning tool utilizes the HP StorageWorks sizer to configure and size the storage requirements. The first half of the installation installs the OCS planning tool files as seen in Figure 1.
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