Formerly known by its code name Indy and working name of Capacity Planning Manager while in beta, System Center Capacity Planner 2006 uses modeling and simulation to help system planners identify performance bottlenecks, measure the effects of changes, and optimize use of resources. This first release is limited to modeling Exchange and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) scenarios and requires manual entry of all parameters—it cannot discover the required data itself or read any information from the MOM or Systems Management Server (SMS) databases. The tool is free to customers with a TechNet subscription, but it is not available for purchase separately.

A follow-on release with broader modeling capabilities, which will be able to be calibrated with historical performance data from the database of the upcoming System Center Reporting Manager, is scheduled for late 2006 or 2007. As part of the long-term Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), a future version of Capacity Planner will be able to automatically build a model of a customer's production system using System Definition Model (SDM) data that will be built into future hardware and software.

In other news related to Microsoft's System Center management products, the company released two solution accelerators—downloadable sets of scripts and prescriptive guidance documents—for SMS 2003 and MOM 2005

SMS 2003 Desired Configuration Monitoring Solution Accelerator. This accelerator enables systems administrators to define templates of desired hardware and software configuration settings, and then use the templates in conjunction with SMS to detect and report noncompliant systems.

MOM 2005 Service Level Agreement (SLA) Scorecard for Exchange. This solution accelerator uses event and performance data collected by MOM 2005 to generate a Web dashboard that measures trends in Exchange server availability and workloads against customer-defined service level baselines.

More information on System Center products is available at www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/systemcenter.

The solution accelerators are available from the Microsoft download site at www.microsoft.com/downloads.