I just read a blog post by Microsoft staff that said System Center Capacity Planner is end of life and will have no new developments. That’s a pity. It’s a concept that was a really good idea, and could have extended to all products in the planning stages.
The idea was that Microsoft would model how their different products would work. You would then describe your network and it would help you design a solution. A simulation could be run to see how your hardware would handle the work loads. Unfortunately it suffered from a few problems. The product set never really grew beyond Exchange, SharePoint and Operations Manager. The newer versions weren’t added. And the available hardware models weren’t kept up to date. Maybe if the model was open source it could have helped but it really needed Microsoft’s assistance.
On the Hyper-V front, I would have loved to see it integrate with data generated by MAP and OpsMgr/VMM to help you design a Hyper-V farm managed by VMM. But that never came to be.
In the end, the results were just a recommendation and not to be 100% relied upon.
The post describes alternative sources for planning OpsMgr, SharePoint and Exchange.