Server consolidation

Server consolidation is a term more frequently used in connection with virtualization, where virtualization helps organizations to consolidate various IT workloads while running independently on a single hardware. What this consolidation mainly does is to achieve cost reduction by getting rid of running dedicated hardware for one application. Other than the cost factor, server consolidation greatly helps to ensure that existing hardware equipment does not stay underutilized and it is utilized in a more productive way.

It is extremely important to analyze the existing environment before going forward with a server consolidation and virtualization project, because we don't just randomly pick up the application server and decide to either convert it into a virtual machine or migrate existing server applications to a virtualized server application instance. Without proper analysis of our workload placement and sizing of underlying infrastructure, we might run into a problem where consolidated and virtualized instances suffer from availability and performance issues. Therefore, we recommend that organizations should perform proper sizing and planning exercises to evaluate all types of computing resources to see whether the same virtualized instance of the existing physical server would be enough to take over the load and scale of the service.