Hi Eliot!
We are building a new application and are building multiple environments, Development, Systems Integration Testing, QA, performance testing , etc.
It is an effort to build a set of infrastructure with a common purpose that can be shared across multiple environments that also gives us the ability, if required to quickly create an HA environment(s) to replicate issues if needed without having to spin up new additional virtual machines. Performance isn't a concern until we get to the performance testing and production environments. Production will obviously NOT be shared but we won't be regularly performing performance tests so building a large set of infrastructure for occaisional performance testing only to have it sit idle a majority of the time doesn't make sense.
Thanks!
Eric