Are there any resources (Templates, tools, etc) that a sys admin would use to perform a capacity planning study? I am going to setup some servers on the cloud but I need to know how many I will need for my usage patterns (e.g. whether some can be consolidated or not), and the memory etc required.
Thanks
IMHO, the best capacity planning tools that exist are trending/graphing solutions like Cacti, Munin or Ganglia. Monitor and graph everything you can: cpu usage, load, memory usage, swap, disk space, disk i/o, network traffic, etc. Graph not only system metrics, but also application ones (number of users, what are they doing, etc) and see how they relate to each other. This will tell you what you need to tune and how your platform is expected to grow in the future.
John Alspaw, VP of Operations at Etsy and ex-Flickr, has given a lot of talks on this subject. I'd recommend this great slides.
Hope this helps!
Im from GISstackexchange, and was hunting around for something else and saw this Q. Although, this Capacity Planning tool spreadsheet is specifcally for ArcGIS Server, may have some use for someone else who comes across this Q. Very detailed, and has videos on how to fill it in.
