Sharepoint 2013 : My Sites (part 2) - Capacity Planning for My Sites

Capacity Planning for My Sites

My Sites are individual site collections, supporting document libraries, lists, and subsites. By default, the owner of a My Site has full control over the collection, and carte blanche on what he or she may store in the collection. This suggests that the size of the default content database for the My Site Host application may grow quite large, as the number of users in an organization (with a My Site) grows. Furthermore, SharePoint provides incentive for users to store content and track events in their My Site, thus increasing user adoption and the need for better capacity planning.

It is good practice to ensure portability of the content databases and dispersal of My Sites across many content databases in the host application. Since each user’s My Site is a site collection, you need to make sure that as more users sign up for My Site space, SharePoint ensures creation of new content databases as the number of site collections grow.

How many content databases do you need, and what limit should you set for the number of My Site collections per database? This depends on the expected amount of content in each My Site (site collection). Microsoft now allows database sizes up to four terabytes, and this limit will grow in the future. Depending on your need for portability and desire for smaller database sizes, the number of site collections in a given database and the expected size of these site collections will roughly define the size of your database. Quota management (see the settings of the My Site Host web application, in the web application list) will allow administrators to restrict the amount of content that users upload to their personal My Sites. If you have the luxury of multiple SQL Servers, you may decide to host My Site content databases on a different server from other areas in your SharePoint farm. The following steps demonstrate restricting My Site collections in a content database to 50 instances:

1. Open Central Administration.
2. Click the Application Management link.
3. Click the Manage Content Databases link.
4. Select the content database for the My Site Host application.
5. In the Database Capacity Settings section, change the maximum number of sites to 50, and set the warning 10% less (45). This ensures that the administrators receive a warning when the number of sites in the current content database grows to 45 and when at 50 SharePoint will create a new content database.