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How often have your heard this, "The Exchange admin vetoed the virtualization project; he felt it was too risky."?

The first wave of server virtualization focused on virtualizing applications primarily for server consolidation in test & development environments. The current phase is transforming infrastructure into one highly efficient pool of resources, enabling greater VM mobility in support of the business. We are seeing anywhere from 15%-20% of workloads virtualized in production today. Going forward, the most advanced customers are looking to standardize on private clouds, which will enable them to reach 100% virtualization in production.

The long road to this journey includes addressing several key questions.

• Can I deploy it? What will the impact be on performance, will my ISV support it and will it really enable consolidation?
• Why should I virtualize and what are its benefits? Here you will need to consider its impact on accelerating application lifecycle. How do I guarantee quality of service, and further, does it really cut my operational costs?

On the performance side, hypervisor vendors such as VMware, Citrix and Microsoft have made tremendous strides expanding their performance capabilities. Today, Virtual Machines can scale to run practically any application in the data center. Also, the top four ISVs provide support for these hypervisors, including MS, IBM, SAP and Oracle. Also, in most cases, virtualization actually lowers licensing costs.

Despite the unique challenges associated with large tier 1 applications, customers are already running applications such as SQL with success. Other applications that are seeing strong adoption include Exchange, SharePoint, and Oracle Database.  

On a final note, adoption in production environments is largely driven both by the economic climate, the need to reduce costs, and by the level of comfort that customers have.