A, system, and computer program product for hardware characterization in a virtual environment are provided in the illustrative embodiments. The hardware resource is allocated to a test virtual machine (VM). A characterization workload is configured to execute in the test VM to characterize a parameter of the hardware resource. The characterization workload is caused to execute on the test VM. A first result of the characterization workload execution is received from the test VM, wherein the result assigns a value to a characteristic of the hardware resource indicative of a behavior of the hardware resource under a set of circumstances.