File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) 1.0 available for download

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.”

The final version is available for download in both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) versions. It is supported on  Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista and  Windows 7 (with the latest service pack applied).

Downloads are available now:
x64: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b20db7f1-15fd-40ae-9f3a-514968c65643
x86: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=0b212272-1884-4af1-972d-42ef1db9f977

A white paper is also included in the download packages, with detailed description of the tool, step-by-step instructions on how to use it and reference of the command line interface.

For questions about FSCT and how to use it, please use the forum at
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/fsct/threads

Also check some details on FSCT on these previous posts (from the release of the beta last year and the release candidate back in July):
http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2009/07/08/file-server-capacity-tool-fsct-release-candidate-available-for-download.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2008/10/06/fsct-a-cifs-smb-smb2-file-server-tool-for-capacity-planning-and-performance-troubleshooting.aspx

This is a major milestone in the two-year journey to offer this tool publicly, which included efforts from a number of people from different teams at Microsoft, including the File Server Team and the Windows Performance Team.