To achieve the lowest cost in Workload Optimization, the administrator should select the Consolidate option, which will place VMs into as few clusters as possible, but allows for less responsive capacity. This is good for populations with steady demand and may reduce licensing and hardware costs, such as power and cooling1. The Consolidate option is one of the three operational intents that can be selected for Workload Optimization, along with Balance and Moderate2. The Balance option will spread VMs evenly over the available resources, but may move VMs more often. The Moderate option will minimize VM contention, but will not attempt to move VMs to achieve better balance or consolidation1. References: 1: Optimize Performance with VMware vRealize Operations 2: Self-Driving Operations by VMware vRealize Operations Datasheet