To determine which group (green, yellow, or red) your application belongs to, you need to pay attention to CPU, memory, network bandwidth, and storage:
- Regarding your VM configuration, a VM scales to 128 vCPUs. Therefore, if your enterprise application uses more than 128 CPUs or if your application requires more than 6 TB of memory, you should not run the application in a VM.
- A variety of tools provides the information that you need to characterize a native application. For example, the Linux top command gives you CPU usage and the memory size of an application. The iostat and netstat commands give you I/O bandwidth information. On a Windows system, Perfmon provides you with similar counters.
Use the resource requirements of your application and the following table to determine if your application is a good fit for virtualization (green), a good fit for virtualization but may need tuning (yellow) or not a good fit for virtualization (red).
| Resource | Application | Category |
| CPU | CPU-intensive, more than 128 CPUs | Green (with latest HW Technology), red |
| Memory | Memory-intensive, greater than 6TB RAM | Green (with latest HW Technology), red |
| Network Bandwidth | 1-27 Gb/S greater than 27 Gb/S | Yellow, red |
| Storage Bandwidth | 10-250K IOPs (consider I/O size) greater than 250K IOPs (consider I/O size) | Yellow, red |