Microsoft Hyper-V holds the promise of consolidation and better utilization, but how do you know if certain servers belong on a Hyper-V host? In many companies, Hyper-V starts in the lab, so it's hard to get a real-world understanding of how production systems will react when running on a shared host.

There are plenty of opinions out there, largely from database administrators and developers concerned about available resources to their applications. There are also several stories involving substandard performance of virtualized applications, but that is usually because the process wasn't fully assessed.