Despite capacity planning is one of the most critical phases of any virtualization adoption project a limited number of customers know that VMware offers a solution for it.

The product, acquired by AOG in 2005, is called Capacity Planner and has a unique capability: after monitoring the workloads performance on physical servers it can compare them against a big database of known values so that customers can recognize if an application has an abnormal behavior before running a P2V migration.

The product is available only through the VMware partners, which have to purchase a license (which expires after six months) to use it at customers site.
Only some customers recognize the value of capacity planning and are glad to pay for it because the operation implies an investment just to understand if virtualization makes sense or not. So the consulting firms sometimes have a hard time to sell the service.

But VMware is about to dramatically change the process: virtualization.info has learned that Capacity Planner will be available free of charge starting on July 1st.

Partners will not be required to buy any license anymore (even if they will still have to attend a classroom course that doesn't come cheap). They will just have to login on the online portal, create a new profile and start monitoring the customer's infrastructure.
The data will stay online for six months and then will be archived.

This move will create serious problems to competing companies like CiRBA and Novell (through PlateSpin) which obviously target the VMware customers.
It's very likely that these companies will shift their focus on Microsoft and Citrix audience very soon.