Under today’s shortened fiscal horizons and contracted time-to-market schedules, traditional approaches to capacity planning are seen by management as inflating production schedules. In the face of relentless pressure to get things done faster, this book facilitates rapid forecasting of capacity requirements, based on opportunistic use of available performance data and tools so that management insight is expanded but production schedules are not. The book introduces such concepts as an iterative cycle of improvement called The Wheel of Capacity Planning, and Virtual Load Testing, which provides a highly cost-effective method for assessing application scalability.