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If your about to go onto a new client’s site to install MOSS or WSS, these are some of the things that need to be considered:

• Base windows install – Hopefully this step will be done for you, as well as any clustering setup either via a load balancer or via NLB.
• Network Access to Servers – Will we have machines that are on the same network as the servers, I’ve been given machines in a test lab that was impossible to use without the VMWare infrastructure client, needless to say that environment didn’t last very long.
• Admin Rights – We need accounts with admin rights to actually install SharePoint
• Active Directory Setup – It’s always a good idea to understand how the organisation is using AD.
• Service Accounts – Make sure the IT department understand the importance of service accounts, hopefully have them pre-created before you get onsite.
• DNS – While you put the request in for the service accounts, double check that your DNS entries are all setup. Have a think about all the zones you intend to use (i.e. are you using web application policy to give admin users god like rights on the admin.portal site?)
• Database – Make sure your setup account has permissions to create databases, you’ll be surprised at how often the DBA’s forget this task.

Remember always to select the complete install, never the web front end only option, you always want the option to change the servers configuration (i.e. start the search server).

MSDN has a new white paper:

Planning and Monitoring SQL Server Storage for Office SharePoint Server: Performance Recommendations and Best Practices

It covers topics such as:

• Database Autogrowth
• Storage settings for the recycle bin
• Using Quota templates
• List performance
• Physical Topology Guidance
• Disk and SAN interfaces
• Network Topology recommendations
• Physical Storage recommendations
• Separating database data files
• Monitoring, Maintaining, and Troubleshooting (which provides some great performance counters that can be used for monitoring)
• Disk and SQL recommended practices

In all it is a great resource. The direct download is here.

The SharePoint Capacity Planning tool can be found here. The executive overview can be found here.

The process of creating a model is very simple:

The UI is wizard based and it asks a number of questions, it's all high level stuff that shouldn't present any issues:

The notes from the overview point out that the tool gives a first approximation, we’ve found that it does a good job recommending hardware, but that the topology of the recommended farms could use some extra thought.

For example, if you created a single intranet site with 25000 users with a heavy collaboration usage profile, the tool will recommend 6 servers, 2 of which are SQL Servers. The tool recommends 3 web front ends and an index server.

Now I’m sure this would work fine, but some questions you could ask are:

Could adding a dedicated web front end that isn’t in the load balanced cluster but that is used to service the indexer add to the performance of the site, since the crawler isn’t competing with end users for resources?

The tool doesn't go into the logical architecture of the SharePoint farm, it's purely hardware related.

Overall I think the tool is very worthwhile, your planning should definitely include running this tool, but don’t let this tool do all the work, do a little bit of thinking for yourself.