Purpose:  to provide you with experience in describing the environment for a web capacity planning study.

Preparation:  Read Chapter 5 of the text.

Exercise:

You have been divided into two groups, an engr group, and a csci group.

• The engr group is to study engr.uark.edu and its supporting subnets. The csci group is to study csci.uark.edu and entropy.uark.edu and their supporting subnets.
• Following the description in section 5.4 of the text, gather information about the client and servers, applications, network connectivity, service-level agreements, LAN management and support, and procurement procedures for your platforms.
• Prepare a presentation for class, to be presented on Monday, June 21.

Guidelines:

• For this assignment you may share information. The presentations should last approximately 10-15 minutes each, and I expect there to be some discussion following the presentations about how a capacity planning study should proceed on these systems. Your grade will be based on the group presentation and your participation in the discussion. You will be asked to grade each other in your group and the other group. It is up to you to be sure you participate fully. Some questions you might want to think about include:
  1. What are the critical applications running on your systems?
  2. What measurements would you need to take to be able to characterized these applications? What tools would be most appropriate?
  3. Can you predict what classes may be found in the workload on your systems? For example, are there faculty computers and instructional lab computers that access your servers? Is most of the access from within the University, or do you think that a substantial portion of the load is from outside the University? What other factors might matter in characterizing the workload?
  4. Although we have not talked yet about workload forecasting, you may be able to say some things about how you expect the workload on your systems to change over the next six months to a year. How will the departmental changes affect the load on this equipment?