Patent ID: 8245140

Claim:
A method for visualizing and simulating server consolidation of different virtual machines in a virtualized data center, the method comprising: identifying a plurality of server computers in a virtualized data center; computing load metrics for each of the server computers; rendering a graph of the computed load metrics for the server computers in a graphical user interface (GUI) in a host computer; selecting as a source one of the server computers and also as a target one of the server computers and further selecting a virtual machine from the source one of the server computers for prospective migration to the target one of the server computers; further computing prospective load metrics for the source one of the server computers and the target one of the server computers resulting from the prospective migration of the virtual machine to the target one of the server computers; and, displaying in the GUI respective graphs of the prospective load metrics for each of the source one of the server computers and the target one of the server computers.