1. Cloud Control Host Lifecycle Management Guide
  2. Monitoring and Managing Hosts
  3. Host Consolidation Planner
  4. Overview of Host Consolidation Planner

Overview of Host Consolidation Planner

Over the years, the typical enterprise data center will grow steadily due to the addition of servers required to satisfy the needs of the business. This growth typically results in excess servers that occupy rack space, consume a lot of power for cooling, and require system maintenance such as security and patching.

Depending on the procurement cycle or the specific hardware vendor agreement in effect, enterprises may acquire different types of server hardware and operating systems, inadvertently creating a confusing array of systems that administrators need to manage, administer, patch and upgrade. This in turn increases labor and ongoing maintenance and support costs against IT budgets. Enterprises look at consolidation as a way to migrate their disparate systems onto standardized operating systems and hardware, with the ultimate goal of reducing costs.

Enterprises also are increasingly investigating virtualization technologies such as Oracle Virtual Machine by moving from physical to virtual servers. This makes it possible to use the shared hardware infrastructure while getting the benefits of isolation that virtualization provides.

The goal of consolidation is to identify such under-utilized servers and find a way to consolidate them, enabling the enterprise to free up as many servers as possible while continuing to maintain service levels. Since servers have different levels of CPU capacity, Host Consolidation Planner uses computer benchmark data to normalize the CPU usage for a given hardware in the consolidation process. Specifically, Host Consolidation Planner uses the following CPU benchmarks for different classes of hardware:

  • SPECint®_base_rate2006 for database hosts, application hosts, or mixed-workload hosts

  • SPECjbb®2005 for middleware platforms

Host Consolidation Planner enables you to match managed target sources you want to consolidate with new or existing target destinations. Consolidate source servers to generic physical machines, Oracle engineered systems (Exadata Database Machines or Exalogic Elastic Cloud systems), or Oracle Virtual Machine (VM) servers.

You can also consolidate source servers to physical machines configured in the Oracle Cloud. In a consolidation of this type, an Oracle Cloud Compute configuration mimics a host, except that only memory and CPU capacity are of consequence as resources to be considered.

By leveraging metric and configuration data collected from managed target servers by Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, Host Consolidation Planner helps you determine the optimum consolidation scenarios that also reflect business and technical constraints in the consolidation process.