Mastering Microsoft® Virtualization

6.3. Analysis

You limited the scope of what systems you were going to look at in the envisioning phase. You collected lots of information about those systems in the discovery phase. Now you want to analyze that information to find candidates for virtualization and the potential savings to be expected by virtualizing. Not every server is a good candidate for virtualization. Financial benefits may not be obtainable from every movement to virtualization. There may be a special hardware configuration that cannot be handled by a virtual machine.

So what makes a good candidate for virtualization? Some of that you should have defined in your vision/scope document. But there is not really a single factor that tells you that a machine should be virtualized. ...