We are also currently running on a VM (4 cores, 8GB of RAM) and it's been running fine. However, several other departments have expressed interest in using the platform to save costs over publisher's bundles, so we requested money for a dedicated piece of hardware to run WW. There's no mechanism for us to easily fund a VM, because the pots of money are different.
I will pass this info on to our IT rep who is handling purchasing.
Thanks!