Disaster recovery is one of the main benefits. After virtualizing, 70% of respondents can fail systems over in less than an hour, while 26% can do so in five minutes. A third of respondents are able to fail over from a primary to a backup data center in less than an hour, while 10% are able to do so in less than five minutes. Before virtualizing, many small IT shops couldn't even afford a disaster-recovery site, and those that could were seeing failover times of two or three days, Burke said.

The findings were based on in-depth conversations, rather than written surveys. Some of the findings were based on a sample size of about 75 respondents, while other findings were based on a sample size of about 200, Burke said.

At first glance, virtualization seems to improve manageability. On average, nine workloads are assigned to each administrator prior to virtualization, while after virtualizing more than 60 workloads can be handled by a single IT pro, Burke's research indicates.

But the management tools IT is accustomed to upon aren't designed for virtual systems, instead treating each server as a physical box hosting one application, he said.

"A lot of this is happening without robust support from the management tools they're used to relying on," Burke said. "There's this level of complexity being added back into the data center."