Server Consolidation

Server consolidation continues to be a hot issue, primarily due to the potential cost-savings in hardware, software, staffing and facilities. Other reasons to consolidate include improved manageability, better service, and increased agility to adapt to changing business needs.

Beyond the political landscape and personnel issues, stacking applications can cause critical performance risks if you are not careful. You don't want to sacrifice service in the interest of consolidation.

To minimize the risks associated with server consolidation, it is important to understand which servers are good candidates for consolidation and how combined applications and workloads will compete for resources, so service levels can be maintained.

TeamQuest Software Addresses Server Consolidation

TeamQuest software lets you quickly and accurately predict the effects of consolidating before actually making any changes. Using analytic modeling capabilities to evaluate consolidation options, you can accurately predict the effects of combining applications and determine which configurations will best support the consolidated environment and efficient IT service delivery.

TeamQuest Surveyor or TeamQuest Analyzer can allow a capacity planner to quickly view workloads from multiple servers across the enterprise. Good candidates for consolidation are often servers with commonalities, such as servers that:

• are located in the same physical data center,
• are underutilized,
• host workloads of similar kind,
• run the same level and make of operating system,
• have appropriate service outage windows.
• share the same security policy, or
• have the same groups of users.

Click for larger view	TeamQuest Predictor is the capacity planner's absolute must-have tool for server consolidation projects. For a server consolidation project to be successful, it is paramount that performance remains within acceptable levels after the consolidation is completed. TeamQuest Predictor allows the capacity planner to verify a proposed server consolidation scenario to make sure that queues in the consolidated server remain low and that performance is not degraded for any of the co-hosted workloads.
Click for larger view	Using a metric called stretch factor as a general performance indicator, the capacity planner can quickly discover whether a proposed server consolidation project is feasible in terms of potential resource queuing that may occur. This important discovery is made without touching a single piece of hardware.
Click for larger view	The capacity planner can also examine the predicted utilization levels of the most utilized resources in the consolidated server.
Click for larger view	Components of response for each workload can be examined to understand which resources in the consolidated server are most critical to the performance of a particular workload. With this information, the capacity planner can quickly pinpoint the root cause of a queuing problem and use TeamQuest Predictor's what-if feature to eliminate the problem.

Addressing server consolidation issues? Contact TeamQuest