Capacity planning

At the Microsoft download center, you can download the Forefront Identity Manager Capacity Planning Guide (http://aka.ms/FIMCapacityPlanning). I will not dig deep into capacity planning in this book, but rather make sure your setup is made in a way that allows you to easily make your FIM environment expand to cope with future needs.

If you look at the following table, you'll see that capacity planning is not easy since there is no straight answer to the problem. If I have 10,000 users, how should I plan my FIM environment? There are too many other parameters to look at.

The fact that the FIM 2010 R2 release includes a number of performance improvements also makes it harder to find relevant facts, since so far most performance testing has been around earlier releases.

I would like to point out one fact, though. In the earlier versions of FIM, MIIS, and ILM, there where huge performance gains by co-locating the synchronization service database with the synchronization service itself. In modern 1-Gigabit networks, and with the changes in the design of FIM, this is no longer the case. And since centralized database servers tend to have better CPU and disk performance, you could even gain performance today by having the database and the service separated.