Patent ID: 8145731

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving, into a capacity planning system including a computer system, workload information representing an expected workload of client accesses of streaming media files from a site; said capacity planning system determining, for at least one server configuration, how many servers of said at least one server configuration to be included at said site for supporting the expected workload in a target manner, wherein said determining how many servers of said at least one server configuration to be included at said site for supporting the expected workload in the target manner comprises: computing, for resources of a single server of said at least one server configuration, a first service demand under the expected workload; determining from said first service demand if said single server has sufficient capacity for supporting the expected workload in the target manner; and in response to determining that said single server does not have sufficient capacity for supporting the expected workload in the target manner, estimating from the first service demand a number of servers of said at least one server configuration that when clustered together in a cluster provide sufficient capacity for supporting the expected workload in the target manner; and said capacity planning system selecting a type of load balancing strategy from among a plurality of types of load balancing strategies to use for the expected workload.