The workload profiler and performance interference (WPPI) system uses a test suite of recognized workloads, a resource estimation profiler and influence matrix to characterize un-profiled workloads, and affiliation rules to identify optimal and sub-optimal workload assignments to achieve consumer Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees and/or provider revenue goals. The WPPI system uses a performance interference model to forecast the performance impact to workloads of various consolidation schemes usable to achieve cloud provider and/or cloud consumer goals, and uses the test suite of recognized workloads, the resource estimation profiler and influence matrix, affiliation rules, and performance interference model to perform modeling to determine the initial assignment selections and consolidation strategy to use to deploy the workloads. The WPPI system uses an online consolidation algorithm, the offline models, and online monitoring to determine virtual machine to physical host assignments responsive to real-time conditions to meet cloud provider and/or cloud consumer goals.