Obviousness

To analyze the obviousness of US patent 11656915 under 35 U.S.C. § 103, it is necessary to identify combinations of prior art references that would render the claims obvious and explain the motivation for such combinations.

Based on the provided "Prior art" section of the patent page, the available information consists of:

• Prior art keywords: virtual, network, virtualization, control center, assets
• Prior art date: 2005-08-15

Limitations of Provided Prior Art:

The strict instruction to "Use the results from the Prior Art section of this page" means relying solely on the "Prior art keywords" and "Prior art date" as presented in the summary information. These keywords, while indicative of the general field of prior art, are not specific prior art references (e.g., patent numbers, publications) that can be individually identified and combined to form an obviousness argument under 35 U.S.C. § 103. An obviousness analysis requires identifying specific prior art documents that disclose elements of the claimed invention.

Therefore, without specific prior art references provided for combination, it is not possible to identify "combinations of prior art references that would render the claims obvious" as requested.

General State of the Art at the Prior Art Date (as described in US11656915):

While specific combinable references are not provided from the designated "Prior art section," the "BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION" section of US11656915 itself describes the general state of the art around the prior art date of August 15, 2005. A person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA) in computer network systems and virtualization management would have been aware of the following:

• IT Management Tasks: These were characterized into managing present-day operations and forecasting capacity for future operations.
• Element Management Systems (EMS) and FCAPS: Major IT management platforms supported the ITU standard for EMS, with functionality in Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance, and Security (FCAPS). This conventional methodology created element-driven management systems focused on individual element performance.
• Limitations of Conventional Capacity Planning: IT capacity planning typically involved bottom-up data aggregation and forecasting methods like trending, simulation, and custom analytics, carried out at the individual device level. This often led to under-utilized IT resources due to worst-case scenario planning.
• Resource Classification: IT resources were classified into client, server, network, and storage categories.
• Emergence of Virtualization: The background acknowledges the "emergence of resource virtualization" and the increasing complexity of managing environments with composite applications, legacy systems, Web services, and service-oriented architectures (SOAs) across globally spread virtual infrastructure.
• Deficiencies in Virtualization Management: Conventional virtualization software tools were often labor-intensive, required manual configuration, and cumbersome change management. A significant issue was that many tools were proprietary, working only with specific vendors' virtual environments, CPUs, operating systems, or virtualization platforms, necessitating multiple tools and diverse skill sets.

Conclusion Regarding Obviousness Analysis:

Given the constraint to "Use the results from the Prior Art section of this page," and that this section only provides keywords and a date, it is not possible to construct an obviousness argument based on the combination of specific prior art references. The "Prior art keywords" ("virtual," "network," "virtualization," "control center," "assets") broadly describe the technical domain, and the "Prior art date" establishes the effective date for assessing prior art. While the "BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION" section outlines known challenges and existing approaches, it does not provide specific documents to combine. Therefore, I cannot identify combinations of prior art references that would render the claims of US11656915 obvious, nor can I explain the motivation to combine non-existent specific references.

To conduct a proper obviousness analysis, concrete prior art references (e.g., patents, publications) that disclose the elements of US11656915 would need to be provided.