7. Virtualization is all about technology

This one won't surprise any longtime IT veteran: Sometimes, it's the people and not the technology that gets in the way. As Corman noted, people and processes are often not ready for the new challenges raised by virtualization.

Even if your virtualization project is a hit, you might become a victim of your own success. Once users might realize how easy it is to spin up a VM, they may become more demanding, making it harder for IT to focus on other tasks. Conversely, there may be resistance from users who prefer to stick with physical servers.

Pradel likes to call politics the "eighth layer" of the network stack.

"The political layer is the most difficult thing you have to deal with as far as virtualization goes," Pradel says. "You have members of your business community who I like to call serer huggers. They do not want to get rid of their physical machines, even though they will benefit from going to virtual."