Application placement among a set of consolidation servers utilizing license cost and application workload profiles as factors

A computer program product for handling media, the computer program product comprising:

• a computer usable non-transitory storage medium having computer usable program code embodied therewith, the computer usable program code configured to instruct a data processor to perform steps of:
• storing information on a storage medium, wherein said information is for a set of applications running on a set of servers, said information comprising:
• (i) licensing data for the set of applications that includes licensing costs per application,
• (ii) application workload requirements for the set of applications running on the set of servers, and
• (iii) records of computing resources of each of the set of servers;
• mapping the application workload requirements of the set of applications to the computing resources of the set of servers;
• determining dependencies for the set of applications running on the set of servers;
• identifying various arrangements to place the set of applications within different ones of the set of servers based on the licensing data, the application workload requirements and the records of computing resources;
• generating a plurality of configurations for the set of applications running on the set of servers, wherein said plurality of configurations comprises a first configuration and a second configuration, wherein different arrangements of the set of applications are placed within different ones of the set of servers in the first configuration and in the second configuration, wherein each of the plurality of configurations are generated:
• (i) to assure that the set of applications are placed within specific ones of the set of servers, and
• (ii) to assure that computing resources of each of the set of servers upon which the set of applications are placed satisfies application workload requirements of a server-subset of the set of applications that are placed within that server;
• calculating licensing costs for the first configuration and for the second configuration, wherein the licensing costs are determined for licenses associated with the set of applications and the dependencies;
• calculating operational costs for the first configuration and for the second configuration;
• calculating total costs for the first configuration and for the second configuration, including summing the licensing costs and the operating costs when calculating the total costs;
• recommending one of the first configuration and the second configuration depending on which configuration has a lower total cost in accordance with the calculations;
• providing results of the recommending to an authorized administrator as part of a programmatic action that consolidates the set of applications running on the set of servers;
• responsive to providing the results, consolidating the set of applications into the first configuration or the second configuration according to the results;
• and
• changing information technology infrastructures for the first configuration and the second configuration using a consolidation tool that includes a graphical user interface, wherein the licensing costs, operational costs, and total costs are calculated automatically and presented within the graphical user interface responsive to specifics constructed using the graphical user interface, wherein as changes are interactively made, cost computations are dynamically and correspondingly changed so that the configurations represented within the graphical user interface have updated and corresponding cost values associated with them.