VMMatty i agree with the majority of your comments.
I would not recommend that any customer should see the results of capacity planner as a view of the long term strategy for their virtual environment. Capacity planner just like all virtual assessment software answers the following questions.
Are my current physical servers good candidates for virtualisation based on the results of the analysis.
If they are good candidates then how many hosts would i need to support this requirement.
(There are other bells and whistles with CP - some of it is legacy, but this is the core of what the product does)
Over time a VM will change as the application requirements will change and in a virtual environment the ability to move the workloads around to ensure the optimum utlisation of resources is what hopefully should be achieved by using features such as vMotion \ DRS.
A virtual assessment using capacity planner, platespin, Cerba or our friends Lanamark is a snapshot of the servers at that point in time (normally 30 days) and should not be seen as the end of the journey - capacity planning and trend analysis of the virtual environment should be performed to ensure it is delivering optimum performance - by capacity planning i mean making sure there is enough available storage of the right type, CPU and RAM resources ..etc.
