Windows Server® 2012 Unleashed

Benchmark Baselines

If you’ve begun defining policies and procedures, you’re already cutting down the number of immeasurable variables and amount of empirical data that challenge your decision-making process. The next step to prepare for capacity analysis is to begin gathering baseline performance values. The Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) is one tool that performs a security compliance scan against a predefined baseline.

Baselines give you a starting point with which you can compare results. For the most part, determining baseline performance levels involves working with hard numbers that represent the health of a system. A few variables coincide with the statistical representations, however, such as workload characterization, vendor ...