As the "the sysadmin of sysadmins" I'm dealing a lot with allocating resources to VMs the developers for the different systems use. This is not a simple task since I have limited physical hardware and about 100 virtual development servers to manage and of course everyone wants his VMs to be as strong as needed. Or more accurately as desired.
The thing is that from my experience, the strength you need for a development server is usually far below official specs since you don't experience the same load on development environments and you don't really need everything to be as smooth as with a production environment.
Of course we do experience more serious performance issues on development environments - especially with new systems we are not fully familiar with yet, but it seems in most cases those issues are not solved by pimping up the server.
I've found myself more than once trying to explain that there's a "real" performance issue and that someone (depending on the case) has to take a really good look at the code, the design or whatever and find the problem, because it's not going to be solved by adding cores, RAM or using a physical server. In those cases I usually have to supply a proof that the RAM and CPU are sufficient and even then I have to deal with claims like "but it's a VM, it might be lying".
It's really like trying to solve an NP-Complete problem in a brute force technique by adding more computational power - this is not a real solution if your input is not bounded and things are never really this simple...
