Quoting SearchServerVirtualization 

A firm with roots in inventory and change management has developed software that it claims can help IT managers unveil the most effective – and safest – possible virtualization and consolidation strategy for their environment.

Cirba is announcing version 4.0 of its Data Center Intelligence (DCI) suite this week, whose new graphical visualization capabilities allow IT managers to quickly identify which servers in their environment can be virtualized, on to which servers.

Capacity planning tools are especially important in very large server environments, said Andrew Hillier, Cirba co-founder and CTO. "If you have 50 servers in a lab and virtualize them, chances are it will just work. But a lab is relatively free of constraints," he said. But if you have 2000 servers, "virtualization is a big opportunity to make a mess."

Cirba starts by gathering data on the environment over the course of several weeks, using agents or agentless data collection mechanisms. The data characterizes the servers, applications and their workloads, as well as business constraints such as geographic and organizational boundaries. Cirba then runs the data through its engine.

The resulting report is a visual scorecard that cross-correlates source and target servers along the x and y axes, and notes their degree of compatibility, with green representing high compatibility, red incompatibility, and yellow – somewhere in between.

...

Read the entire article, here.