IT organizations are increasingly being called upon to cost-effectively deliver reliable support for the entire catalog of business services, or risk outsourcing to a managed service provider. Previously, capacity planners and IT architects would use historical trends to predict capacity requirements and simply over-provision to account for any peaks caused by seasonality, error, or extraneous influences like mergers & acquisitions. Over-provisioning, combined with poor lifecycle management of new resources provisioned in the data center, has led to capacity utilization and inefficiency issues. While historical data is great for understanding past issues and current state of the environment, the performance of servers, hosts and clusters is not linear; at some level of saturation, the performance of that infrastructure will quickly start to degrade.