Abstract The goal of the proposed capacity planning tool is to provide the best cost/performance configuration for support of a known media service workload. There are two essential components in our capacity planning tool: i) the capacity measurements of different h/w and s/w solutions using a specially designed set of media benchmarks and ii) a media service workload profiler, called MediaProf, which extracts a set of quantitative and qualitative parameters characterizing the service demand. The capacity planning tool matches the requirements of the media service workload profile, SLAs and configuration constraints to produce the best available cost/performance solution. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems. General Terms: Measurement, Performance, Design.