The Total Cost of Investment (TCO) model for enterprise Java virtualization has been developed based on the experiences of some of the largest BEA enterprise customers. It shows that organizations running large Java EE applications are likely to benefit significantly from running on a hypervisor-based virtualization platform, such as VMware????????s Virtual Infrastructure.

However, those organizations should look carefully at the software architecture they will adopt. While it may appear reasonable simply to replicate existing software stacks in virtual machines, this is likely to detract from the TCO gains that are achievable through the combination of virtualization and multicore processor technology. In many cases, the Virtualized LVM model, by eliminating the need for operating-system software and allowing the Java runtime stack to run directly on the hypervisor platform, will deliver greater TCO benefits.