Capacity-planning worksheets

When planning capacity, keep in mind where people are located and how they will access IBM® Sametime®. When using the sample tables, contact your IBM Account representative to work with IBM Techline who can provide detailed analysis of your hardware and software requirements.

The tables that follow provide sample capacity-planning information for a fictional company called Renovations, Inc. Use the tables as a guide for determining your own organization's capacity requirements.

Sample worksheets used by Renovations, Inc.

The first item to consider is your user base. What type of users will you have? Internal employees, remote employees, mobile? Also consider whether you will allow external users to connect with Sametime.
Table 1. User types and access
Type Primary Access Notes
Remote employees VPN Performs majority of work by means of VPN over broadband connection. In some cases, connection will be slower, such as DSL
Mobile employees varies 60%+ of work performed using mobile device. If <60% of work is performed using a mobile device, this user can be classified as Remote.
Internal employees LAN Performs majority of work on corporate LAN.
External Internet This could include customers, vendors, or business partners who access via browser client only.

The following table proposes a starting point for mapping the user classifications to the components in Sametime Communicate and Sametime Conference. These are not hard-and-fast rules, so you should feel free to adapt it to your company's needs. However, be sure to interview a representative sample of the user population from each classification before making any assumptions.

Here is a sample of Sametime component needs based on employee and customers of Renovations, Inc.
Table 2. User-to-component mapping for Renovations, Inc.
Type Community Services Meeting Services Sametime Proxy Services Media Manager Services
Remote employees Yes Yes No Yes
Mobile employees Yes Yes Maybe No
Internal employees Yes Yes No Yes
External No Maybe Maybe No
Now add numbers to the table. For Renovations, Inc., the following numbers represent users per component.
Table 3. Sample component use
Type Community Services Meeting Services Sametime Proxy Services Media Manager Services
Remote employees 54,000 54,000 0 48,0000
Mobile employees 12,000 0 0 0
Internal employees 57,600 57,600 0 57,600
External 0 800 800 0
Total 120,000 10,880 800 105,600
The following, Anticipated Peak Use, shows the peak rate for each component. Also, see the example in the following IBM Redbook:Determining different classes of users.
Table 4. Sample anticipated peak use
Community Services Meeting Services Sametime Proxy Services Media Manager Services*
Peak rate (%) 85% 5% 10% 4%
Number of users at peak rate 102000 5440 80 4224
*Peak n-way calls only (point-to-point calls excluded)
In our sample, we now have enough information to size our deployment.
  • In this sample, Renovations, Inc. maintains a regional data center in North America and in Europe. EMEA and AP users (38% of the total population) will use the EMEA datacenter.
  • Renovations, Inc. leases 155Mb circuits for their WAN. This bandwidth is not enough to support the peak A/V from a single data center, and so distinct Media Managers will be maintained in each data center.
  • Renovations, Inc. is going to leverage the proxy server for their customer portal; there is no high availability requirement for this component.
  • Renovations, Inc. has asked for a highly available infrastructure supporting peak load plus tolerance for the failure of any single component in the system (with the exception of the Sametime Proxy Server)

The following are the server requirements for peak rates and high availability for Renovations, Inc.

Table 5. Sample: servers based on deployment sizing
Servers Peak High Availability WebSphere® Application Server Proxy Servers
Sametime Community Servers

NA 3

EMEA 2

NA 1

EMEA 1
Sametime Proxy Servers

NA 1
Sametime Meeting Servers

NA 3

EMEA 2

NA 1

EMEA 1

NA 2

EMEA 2

Media Managers:Sametime SIP Proxy/Registrar, + Conference Manager

NA 1

EMEA 1

NA 1

EMEA 1

NA 1

EMEA 1
DB2®

NA 1

EMEA 1

NA 1

EMEA 1
Totals 15 8 6

Blank worksheets

Table 6. Worksheet: Component Use
Type Community Services Meeting Services Sametime Proxy Services Media Manager Services
Remote employees
Mobile employees
Internal employees
External
Total
Table 7. Worksheet: Anticipated Peak Use
Community Services Meeting Services Sametime Proxy Services Media Manager Services
Peak rate (%)
Number of users at peak rate
Table 8. Worksheet: Servers based on deployment sizing
Servers Peak High Availability WebSphere Application Server Proxy Servers
Community Servers
Sametime Proxy Servers
Meeting Servers
Media Managers
DB2
Totals