So you are not going to get exactly what you want but the question from Aaron, Elan and Mark was the fact that the guidance to give a customer collocating their Archiving database with their SQL backend for OCS was rather vague.

In the OCS Planning Guide on page 85 the discussion of the server details is raised and for Archiving and CDR the amount of memory is 16gb for both CDR and Archiving (IM) but what is the user profile?

Well the user profile is published and well hidden, it is in the OCS Planning Tool but guess what isn't documented in there - the archiving numbers.

So how do you wade through this as there is no OCS Stress tool? You have to start with the understanding that we create a text matrix and user model that will meet the highest numbers we feel we can get with available hardware on the market and according to the statistics we have from our deployment and our customers participating in beta (TAP) programs.

So that means that any number published and not explicitly stated for a Standard Edition deployment or a small deployment will of course be for our large deployments. Today the consolidated Enterprise pool will support 30,000 concurrent users and the expanded Enterprise pool will support 125,000 users.

So what does Aaron, Elan and Mark do for their customer - they realize that the 16gb of memory is sufficient to archive at the largest size and they scope this appropriately for their smaller customers. The real key is that collocating will require more physical disk spindles for the logs and databases.

The good news - we are still on track to release planning tools for 2007 R2 after RTM. This will allow customers and consultants to create a customer specific user profile and then test it.

TomL LCSKid