Within many busy IT departments, virtualization has already proved its worth as the best way to tackle the proliferation of physical servers that clutter up valuable data centre space, guzzle power and cooling and impose a significant burden on available time and skills.

By using virtualization technology to consolidate multiple smaller servers onto fewer, larger machines, many organisations have achieved significant ‘early wins’ with the technology in the form of reduced data-centre footprints, lower energy bills and more centralized management.

It’s no surprise, then, that in a 2009 survey conducted by IT market analyst firm Freeform Dynamics, the vast majority of businesses (92 per cent) had already implemented virtualization to some extent within their x86 server environments.