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R2 Capacity Planning tool run through and XML file problem

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I have had the distinct pleasure or misfortune to have used the LCS 2005 SP1 capacity planning tools and the unreleased OCS 2007 capacity planning tools with customers. As I loaded the tool, I forgot about some of the feedback that I provided on the toolset which is nice to see exposed. Things like being able to specify the password for users,  I am now running through the R2 Capacity Planning tool in my own small lab as we have a customer who was monitoring the load on their pool and by querying SQL they were not showing a balanced load. We don’t document a SQL query checking load but of course this does beg the question of what that query is reporting on.

I ran into a problem and amazingly I found a forum post of someone else experiencing the issue so I asked them to follow up with me so I could ensure I resolve theirs too. Even more amazing is that I looked in a forum location that isn’t supposed to exist since we migrated to the Technet location - https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/uccommunityreadiness

If you see a forum post with just social.microsoft.com then you should know that nobody is likely monitoring them and that the data should eventually be migrated: https://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ucccommunityocsdeployment/thread/86a971fc-df26-4bf6-9688-230cf6be2acc 

In my testing I found a problem in the XML generation tool. The xml file does not include the proper syntax for the password. Copy the data below and replace with your password -

<UserGlobalPassword>password</UserGlobalPassword>

Yesterday I ran the query and showed 2 endpoints which was correct but the R2 MMC reported 3 endpoints. Highlight your R2 pool in the left tree view and then select the database tab in the right hand contents pane. Hit Go on – To retrieve current user summary statistics for the selected pool, please click Go. Seeing a discrepancy with so few clients I thought I would try to put some stress through the system and see if I can get the SQL query to report one item while the SIP TLS Performance Counter shows another. I don’t seem to recall being able to run the tool on actual OCS roles but dedicated stress boxes, in the R2 version I run the tool to create users for simulation from the SQL Back End (or Front End if you choose).

I will be continuing to work with the tool, my plan is to use this through the Edge Server role and if I get enough time, I might even try it with a federated lab topology as well.

TomL LCSKID

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Getting server logs would help but my first thought would be that the client workstation running the stress is not joined to the domain. If you changed the authentication to NTLM only does it work (restart services)

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2009
    Hi Tom, I ran into similar problems when using the OCS Stress Tool.The user wont log on and the packet captures revealed incomplete tls handshake.After client and server hello there are no change cipher specs messages exchaged and i see no kerberos authentication happening. I re ran the test with the password xlm change you suggested...but the results are the same as before. Thanks, Arnab