A system and method for reconfiguring a computing environment comprising a consumption analysis server, a placement server, an infrastructure management client and a data warehouse in communication with a set of data collection agents and a database. The consumption analysis server operates on measured resource utilization data to yield a set of resource consumptions in regularized time blocks, collects host and virtual machine configurations from the computing environment and determines available capacity for a set of target hosts. The placement server assigns a set of target virtual machines to the target set of hosts in a new placement. In one mode of operation the new placement is nearly optimal. In another mode of operation, the new placement is “good enough” to achieve a threshold score based on an objective function of resource capacity headroom. The new placement is implemented in the computing environment.