Described herein is a system for improving accuracy in a prediction of resource usage of an application running in a virtual environment. The system comprises a first hardware platform implementing a native hardware system in which an application natively resides and executes, the native hardware system operating to execute a predetermined set of benchmarks that includes at least one of a network-intensive workload and a disk-intensive workload, a second hardware platform implementing a virtual environment therein, the virtual environment operating to execute the predetermined set of benchmarks, and a third hardware platform operating to collect first resource usage traces from the first hardware platform that result from the execution of the predetermined set of benchmarks in the native hardware system and second resource usage traces from the second hardware platform that result from the execution of the predetermined set of benchmarks in the virtual environment. The third hardware platform further operating to perform a linear regression computation to generate at least one prediction model that predicts a resource usage of the application executing in the virtual environment based on the collected first and second resource usage traces.