Generally speaking, consolidation refers to the process of combining multiple things to make a single, more  effective unit. In an IT context, you can consolidate several types of things, including physical servers, SQL Server instances, storage, and locations.

This Consolidation Guide is the first in a series of documents that will provide concepts, procedures, and hard performance data that will help you successfully consolidate your Microsoft® SQL Server® 2000 and SQL Server 2005 databases from multiple machines onto a single SQL Server 2008 server system. In this Guide, we use the Dell™ PowerEdge™ 2950 as a target server.