Forefront TMG 2010 Capacity Planning Tool

Posted on June 29, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

Version 1.0 of the ForeFront Threat Management Gateway2010 Capacity Planning Tool has been released.

This tool is to help you with planning and sizing (or verifying) your TMG 2010 configuration, and gives a calculation on the hardware configuration, number of concurrent users and bandwidth requirements using hardware, concurrent users or bandwith as starting point.

For its calculations the tool uses parameters like number of concurrent users and features you want to enable on the TMG. Regarding features you can make your own selection or use presets, e.g. “Mail Protection” for using TMG as an anti-spam/anti-malware e-mail gateway. The calculator has support for load-balancing and virtualization.

You can download the Forefront TMG 2010 capacity planning tool here.

Forefront Protection 2010 Capacity Planning Tool

Posted on May 11, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

The folks at Microsoft released version 1.0 of the Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server capacity planning tool. This tool is to aid you in planning and sizing your FPE configuration.

The tool starts with the question if you want to evaluate your current setup or are planning for a new environment. After that you need to select the required architecture, Standard for small to medium sized organizations or Enterprise for large organizations (e.g. combined Exchange Server roles). You can define the required level of protection (i.e. number of engines on Edge, Hub Transport and Mailbox Server roles) and see the predicted effect on the hardware requirements. After completing the questionnaire you receive the recommended hardware configuration.

You can also see the predicted performance for different setups, i.e. virtual or non-virtual setup, Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 R2 as well as Exchange level (2007 or 2010).

You can download the FPE capacity planning tool here.

Forefront Security for Exchange SP2 RU1

Posted on February 18, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

With all these “2010” information you could forget that most customers are still running earlier versions. For people running ForeFront Security for Exchange SP2, Rollup 1 was released yesterday. Besides a new parameter (called feature) for enabling of disabling FSE on a cluster node, RU1 contains no less than 30 hotfixes. For a list of fixes, consult the related knowledgebase article here. You can download FSE SP2 RU1 after submitting a hotfix request here.

ForeFront UAG Exchange Publishing Guide

Posted on February 2, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

The ForeFront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) team published an update on ForeFront UAG content series. One of these guides is the Forefront UAG Content Series- Exchange Services Publishing Solution Guide, which can be downloaded here.

For those interested, the other ForeFront UAG guides are:

ForeFront TMG BPA released

Posted on January 21, 2010 by Michel de Rooij

Today, Microsoft released the Forefront Threat Management Gateway Best Practices Analyzer, or ForeFront TMG BPA for short. Like other Best Practice Analyzer tools, this tool is to analyze the configuration and health of systems, based on predetermined best practices rules. The tool reports any issues, after which you can take action. Note that the installation also contains a tool, titles BPA2Visio, to (as you can probably guess) generate Visio drawings using the information found in TMG. BPA2Visio requires a Visio installation. You can download ForeFront TMG BPA, which is labeled version 8.0.1, here.

Be advised that TMG BPA only works on TMG, not on ISA installations. For ISA analysis, use ISA BPA which can be downloaded here.