>The monitoring team reports that SQL server appears to be under-utilized. They say that the disk I/O is higher than the previous environment and it has been confirmed that CPU power is similar. They report however that the database is not fully utilizing the available RAM. Only half of it is presently being utilized. So, they are wondering if this could be the bottleneck.

Make sure that such measurements are taken inside the VM, not on the base host HW. Make sure that disc is at least a dedicated VHD or similar file if not mapping to separate partition or dedicated HW.