Capacity planning refers to a variety of methods of optimizing capacity and thereby achieving cost savings and improved performance. SQL Governor offers four different capacity planning features: server right-sizing, server consolidation, instance consolidation and database consolidation.
Note that before you can get accurate results with capacity planning, you should let SQL Governor monitor your environment for a while. The more data you have, the better the results will be.
Server right-sizing
In right-sizing, the current resource usage of each server is measured and used to determine the optimal number of cores. For instructions on right-sizing, see How to find the right number of cores for servers.
Server consolidation
In server-level consolidation, the goal is to find the right physical hardware or cloud virtual machine for hosting virtual servers. It can also be used for cloud-to-cloud migrations. For instructions, see How to do server consolidation.
Instance consolidation
In instance-level consolidation, instances are "stacked" upon one another onto servers in a way that minimizes resource peaks and bottlenecks while minimizing the number of cores. Instance-level consolidation consists of solutions, projects and mappings. For instructions on each of these steps, see How to create planning solutions and projects and How to create a planning mapping.
Note that if you are migrating your instances onto on-premise servers, you need to create target templates for your physical and virtual servers. For more information, see How to create physical target servers and How to create virtual target servers. For migration into the cloud, these steps are not required.
Database consolidation
In database-level consolidation, databases are moved from existing instances onto new ones. Databases from separate instances can easily be combined onto the same instance, or they can be separated onto different instances. For more information, see How to do database consolidation.