ISA Firewall Sizing Calculator Now Online
One question that comes up several times a week is “how many ISA firewalls do I need and how ’big’ do they need to be”?
To be more specific, the questions are I hear and see go along these lines:
- “I have 5000 remote access VPN users. How many ISA firewalls do I need and how big do those boxes have to be
- “I have 10,000 OWA users. How many ISA firewalls do I need and how big do those boxes have to be
- “I have 15,000 users on my corporate network, how many ISA firewalls do I need and how big do those boxes need to be
These are valid questions. While there is an excellent ISA firewall performance best practices white paper over at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/isa/2...s.mspx there is a bit of a learning curve to understanding how to apply that white paper to an actual deployment and busy network admins and sales staff tend to shy away from that kind of work.
To solve this problem, Microsoft has come up with an ISA firewall sizing calculator. You can find it on the ISA firewall landing page over at www.microsoft.com/isaserver and it’s part of the flash content at the top of the page.
Let me know what you think of the calculator. I’m particularly interested in whether or not you think the sizing calculator answers the question above and if it answers any other specific question you have for you own ISA firewall deployment. Just post your responses to this blog post and I’ll make sure they get to the right people at Microsoft.
Thanks!
Tom
Jason Jones Says:
June 13th, 2006 at 9:50 am
Looks pretty handy…I have just run a couple of customer examples through the calculator and seems to produce some sensible results. Will try to use it for the next design and compare to “gut feel”
TJ Says:
June 13th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
I have reviewed the ISA 2006 calculator and find this to be very helpful. Thank you for pointing this out.
In reference to the line items, I would suggest that each heading have an icon to click on to further define the categories goal and why it is there, and then within each subline topic, a detailed explanation of why this line matters, how to run the calculations in a general. URL Links for additional Engineering Methods of calcutions would be extremely acceptable. Using any or all of the aforementioned definitions and or articles would be great for a published support to backup proposals.
Note: In the region we represent Microsoft Solutions, the business’s are primary 50 uers or less as well as the small 1-25 homes offices connecting to the Branch Office that has 1-10 employees. The ISP’s are normally small-town DSL’s connections. We use the ISA in all of our projects especially for a Home Office to Branch Office Consistent Connection, but allowing each location to use their own DNS and ISP to access the Internet. We have many ISA 2000’s and a few ISA 2004’s. We expect to start implementing the ISA 2006 while bringing the existing users up to ISA 2006 as well. Therefore any assistance, such as the calculator is exciting.
Note 2: We have three of Thomas Shinder authored ISA books and use them as our Bible.
Thanks again for your great support to the ISA Community,
… TJ
Thomas Shinder Says:
June 14th, 2006 at 9:36 am
Hi TJ,
Thanks for the feedback on the calculator and thanks even more for getting the books!
Tom
Thomas Shinder Says:
June 14th, 2006 at 9:37 am
Hi Jason,
Great! Let us know if there’s anything else you’d like to see in future versions of the calculator. It’s based on an .xml document so it’s relatively easy to update the calculations and results
Thanks!
Tom