The goal of the proposed benchmarking and capacity planning framework is to evaluate the amount of resources needed for processing a given workload while meeting the specified performance requirements. There are two essential components in our capacity planning framework: (i) the capacity measurements of different hardware and software 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, SLA and configuration constraints to produce the best available cost/performance solution. In case of a multi-node configuration, the capacity planner performs a cluster sizing evaluation by taking into account the choice of load balancing solution.