Virtualization has transcended being a novelty buzzword, or a noble computing experiment, and is now a resource used by corporate and law firm IT departments. It promises everything from a higher return on IT investment to a greener environment by simply consolidating several computer systems onto less hardware.
The grandiose promises of virtualization may lend support to the results of InformationWeek’s Virtualization Report (“The New Sprawl: Managing Virtual Server Environments” Analytics Report, April 2008) that surveyed 323 IT professionals and found that approximately 15 percent of them do not already use a primary virtualization platform. This suggests that approximately 85 percent of the respondents currently employ some type of virtualization which, by any measure, is a high rate of adoption for the technology.
