Patent ID: 8108857

Claim:
A computer system adapted to determine hardware system environment for a given set of workloads comprising: a memory within which is resident a specification which defines the functionality of each workload and a plurality of resource demands for each workload; at least one processor configured to execute a plurality of threads; and program code executed by the at least one processor to define the functional specification, a plurality of hardware resource demands, and a plurality of performance objectives for each workload; divide each workload into one or more functional logical partitions (FLPARS), each FLPAR having the plurality of software and hardware demands determined by its associated workload; define a physical specification for the one or more FLPARS, the physical specification comprising one of high level software and hardware system restrictions and a predefined pool of hardware components; configure a plurality of potential hardware system environments each comprising a group of hardware components selected from a predefined pool of hardware components, where each hardware component to provides a plurality of resource capacities, and each of the plurality of potential hardware system environments to provides specific resource capacities that at least satisfy the specific resource demands of the given set of workloads; partition each of the potential hardware system environments into a plurality of virtual machine nodes where each of the virtual machine nodes corresponds to one of the FLPARS; assign a plurality of priority weight factors, where each priority weight factor is assigned to a specific resource demand of a specific FLPAR; compute weighted sum of squares metrics for the each of the potential hardware system environments as S = ∑ i ∈ R ⁢ ⁢ w i ⁡ ( y i - f ⁡ ( x i ) y i ) 2 where each ‘w i ’ is the priority weight factor for the corresponding FLPAR, each ‘y i ’ is the specific resource capacity of the corresponding virtual machine, and each ‘f(x i )’ is the specific resource demand of the specific logical partition; and determine hardware system environment with a lowest weighted sum of squares metric.