I’m sitting in a session on server consolidation at the conference. It’s a good presentation so far conveying a lot of common sense when it comes to server consolidation, a treadmill that I am personally on right now. Clear expectations regarding the following points must be commonly understood.

• Understand upfront costs
• Time to recover costs
• Replaced server disposition as assets
• Changes to procedures
• System management benefits
• Staff elimination vs. reassignment
• Impact on the service-level agreement, if one exists
• Time to complete project
• Time commitment of project staff
• Knowing when enough is enough

One aspect of the session that was discussed but not detailed was server rationalization, which is a combination of monitoring and analytics to produce system profiles to aid consolidation decisions. Server rationalization is an elusive beast. In my quest for server consolidation I’ve run into very few tools to aid server rationalization. Cirba and IT Guru System Planner are the two most comprehensive tools I’ve found. They are by no means inexpensive. You can coble together a set of tools from BMC, NetIQ, HP, IBM, Microsoft, etc. which will provide you the data and limited analytics but you will have to do a fair amount of manual work to compile your profiles and produce recommendations. Server rationalization, while appearing to be a science, is anything but.