IBM eServer xSeries Server Consolidation: an Introduction

This redpaper is an introduction to server consolidation (SCON) in the xSeries® Intel® processor-based marketplace and describes the author’s experience in that area. It is targeted at technical specialists who have little or no server consolidation background or seek to have additional points of view and experiences. This includes a customer, Business Partner, or IBM® specialist who needs to understand SCON concepts so they can describe it to others.

This redpaper does not cover all of the background information about SCON; this is not meant to provide sales SCON methodology, but it addresses what the author feels is still lacking, which is the technical and architectural possibilities (and challenges) associated with any server consolidation project.

This redpaper is to be considered as high-level guidance on how to proceed in a complex solution design given an organization commitment to start rationalize the distributed Intel infrastructure which is typically comprised of hundreds if not thousands of servers. This is a very informal and operational guide. Even though we will not get into the technical details, the author has put together all of the technologies currently available and how they fit together with the only common objective of consolidating and rationalizing an existing distributed infrastructure to create a more manageable environment.

This redpaper should not be considered an official source of methodologies to carry out such projects, but rather the result of ten years of field experience.

Technical background
What is the problem, then
Different level of consolidation:Overview
Hardware consolidation
Operating system consolidation
Middleware consolidation
Application consolidation
Typical concerns and doubts

Related product families

Product families related to this document are the following:

• VMware vSphere