How to decide whether a particular server should be virtualized?
Answer: According to experts’ virtualization studies, more than 90% of physical servers can be virtualized. Software companies are actively collaborating with virtualization platform providers to simplify P2V server migration. Server virtualization opportunity depends on the purposes physical servers are used for (dev/test environment or production) as well as on the applications used on servers. A server with an application that has some specific devices, creates processor load over 85% or uses more than 4 logical CPU/more than 16Gb of RAM, is not very good for virtualizing. In case of dev/test usage, when servers are constantly reconfigured and adjusted, virtualization is necessary to simplify their management and maintenance. In case of production usage, you should analyze hardware load. This can be done by using performance counters. If the load of hardware components (CPU, memory, disk and network) is about 15% and stable enough, the server is a good candidate to be virtualized.
