Capacity Planner is a powerful tool that automatically collects all the relevant performance metrics on each Windows server in your environment and prepares a report that you can use to determine your hardware requirements for your virtual environment. It can identify trends in your environment and make recommendations for grouping physical servers on virtual hosts. It uses the built-in Microsoft performance counters and does not require that an agent is installed on each server that will be analyzed (it uses the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and the Remote Registry service). Using Capacity Planner is the best method for collecting data from your servers and reporting on it, because it was developed specifically for infrastructure assessment and data analysis and will provide consolidation estimates, recommendations, and capacity assessments.

The Capacity Planner dashboard is delivered as a web-based application that delivers rich analysis, modeling, and decision support capabilities based on the data collected from your data center. Service providers will use this interface to access pre-built report templates and create custom reports depending on the type of assessment being delivered. The analysis provided by the Capacity Planner dashboard is based on comparisons to reference data collected across the industry. This unique capability helps in guiding decisions around server consolidation and capacity optimization for your data center.

Note that, beginning with vCenter Server version 2.5, there was a lite version of Capacity Planner integrated into vCenter Server called Guided Consolidation. This utility uses a built-in wizard to discover physical systems and analyze them to prepare them to be converted into VMs. Once these systems have been analyzed, they can be converted into VMs by the built-in VMware Converter feature of vCenter Server 2.5. However, starting from vSphere version 5, this plugin has been removed from vCenter.