6. Do you have a capacity-planning discipline? Virtual server sprawl is a common result of virtualization deployments outgrowing their existing capacity. EMA recommends IT organizations use detailed capacity-planning measures to make sure they have sufficient hardware and software resources to support their virtualization implementation and make sure it doesn’t get out of control.

7. Is there support for your environments? While many popular, packaged applications support virtualization, many applications do not, EMA says. The research group recommends IT shops investigate which of their software and hardware platforms are supported and which might require them to upgrade before rolling out virtualization.

8. Can your network support virtualization? Network and storage can represent potential bottlenecks for virtualization in the data center. For instance, virtualization technologies that focus on the user, such as application or desktop virtualization or application streaming, don’t work well over low-bandwidth connections, EMA says. Enterprise IT managers can try to address network and storage limitations with WAN-optimization technologies or by limiting the proliferation of images.

9. Can your management systems handle virtual environments? While virtualization reduces the number of physical resources to manage, it increases the complexity of the overall environment and introduces management issues that that could challenge some IT managers. For instance, the ease of deployment leads to a proliferation of virtual machines, or virtual server sprawl, which makes management exponentially more difficult. Also the added layer of software increases the complexity of managing the entire environment, EMA says.“Until management tools catch up with virtualization, the key to success is having not just tools, but also strong process disciplines for discovery, performance management, configuration management, patch management, service-level management, provisioning, disaster recovery” and more, the report reads.

10. Does virtualization help you address

business objectives? Perhaps the“most overlooked factor in the rush to virtualization” is aligning the technology implementation with specific business goals, EMA says. To measure the success of a virtualization rollout, enterprise IT shops must first know their desired results before deploying the technology. EMA recommends IT managers plan for long-term strategic results and not use virtualization as a quick fix for a pressing pain point. For instance, while many organizations may consider cost savings a result of virtualization, EMA reports that is not often the case.

“Overall, cost savings is not always the most likely outcome -- in fact, reduced costs (software, hardware and floor space) are the least expected outcomes. Despite the touted cost benefits of server consolidation, for example, it delivers only one-off cost savings, and the additional costs -- especially of software -- are often considerable,” the report reads.