Server virtualization in distributed environments is exploding in popularity and adoption. Virtualization should allow organizations to improve their use of currently underutilized computing resources, holding promise of simpler system administration, fewer servers to manage, reduced power consumption and a reduced carbon footprint. Virtualization has quickly reached a level of technical maturity; now the challenge CIO's face is to extract the maximum economic value from the adoption of virtualization. Dynamics such as "VM sprawl" indicate that we're not there yet; they indicate that IT teams are working with too little information to realize the full potential of virtualization.

CIO's are all facing budget pressures, the need to do more with fewer resources, diminishing data center capacity, new requests to support business initiatives and rising pressure to improve the organization's impact on the environment. When you consider that IT operations create as much pollution as the airline industry, it's clear that there's a lot of potential improvement on all these fronts. Virtualization allows IT to use servers selectively to process workloads from applications as they're required, minimizing the amount of time computing capacity remains idle, effectively waiting for something to do. Most businesses only use about 18% of their actual compute power, so the potential savings should be enormous.