Software-based virtualization products enable most all industry-standard server models to support workload virtualization. However, not all systems make the best virtualization platforms. In order to support the execution of multiple workloads without starving applications of vital compute resources, a virtualization platform needs to offer high compute performance, a large memory footprint, and superior I/O expansion capabilities. The performance, memory capacity, I/O, and high reliability characteristics of Oracle’s Sun Fire X4470 server make it an ideal mission-critical virtualization platform.