A mainframe can be used to consolidate workloads from many individual servers. Therefore, if there is a large administration overhead or a physical capacity concern of many individual servers, the mainframe can take on the role of a single server environment managing those workloads. It can present a single view of administration, performance and recovery for applications that harness the mainframe's services during execution.

Several application servers can easily be migrated into one logical partition of a mainframe's resources, thus providing ease of management and monitoring. Consolidation also allows for instrumentation and metric gathering, resulting in easier capacity analysis.