However, any user entertaining the idea of moving servers into a virtual world are best served by avoiding the urge to get caught up in the hype that will inevitably arrive throughout 2006. Instead, analysts advise that a critical evaluation of resources and an ironclad grip on understanding the behavior of the server workloads and styles is necessary before they even utter the word virtualization.

"Virtualization is fundamentally sharing resources; it is changing the way resources are allocated and if customers are not careful, they can get performance issues," said Rye Brook, N.Y.-based Ideas International Ltd. analyst Tony Iams. "Make you're your servers are underutilized before going to virtual machines."