Virtualization is truely a magic stick. We have been using it for a year now, for servers and desktops, and it is so powerful yet not difficult to manage. We plan to use it for storage during this year. We just love it.

Does anyone have a reliable and compelling business case/ value proposition for standing up a virtualization services practice?

Virtualization has paid off nicely for my organization, in fact, it saved us > 500K on an AC & UPS upgrade had we stayed on the older path of new application (DEV, QA or PROD) = more hardware. Outside of the obvious power & cooling savings, centralized management has made the sys admins happier and the ability to deliver a system in literally minutes has showed real IT value.

While virtualization saves no matter how you look at it, it still costs. In order to balance server workloads and maintain application service levels the servers running VM's require memory and that's expensive. I can run 4 vm's on a single blade but given each vm requires 4GB RAM, I'm looking at purchasing 16GB of RAM and that my friends isn't cheap.

Mark,

Can u elaborate more on what exactly u need?

Abstraction in IT always allows technology to get progressively closer to business goals and requirements and virtualization is another example of this. The most interesting thing in the survey, to me, are the responses to why CIOs are investing in virtualization. My guess is that 5 years from now the order of the answers will be reversed.

~ Erik Josowitz, VP Product Strategy, Surgient ~

Check out www.kidaro.com for enterprise class desktop virtualization.

Speaking from an admittedly biased view (4+ years at VMware, 1.5 at Scalent), I'm really worried by comments like the "Magic Stick" one above.

Virtualization is a great tool. When used correctly. Bear in mind that most server virtualization technologies (aka hypervisors):

(A) add overhead (differently depending on type of workload) and

(B) still depend on underlying physical machines being correctly connected to network and storage. (Hypervisors are operating systems: think Microsoft in 1985, "your data center will work seamlessly if it's all 100% MSFT")

Addressing challenge (B) is why I chose to leave one of the hottest startups in the last decade to help lead what is hopefully another great solution.

We feel we have a set of desktop resources that would be perfect for virtualizaiton. Our biggest roadblock to date is Microsoft licensing! They really do not have a good model or good story for this. Even their "Centralized Desktop" license still requires you to license the end-points, not the centralized desktop. An innovation killer IMHO.