• When a disaster recovery site is created, tested or updated, its network settings must be verified to match the master site. Manual verification adds delay.

• When new servers are added to scale up a load-balanced system, several devices may need carefully sequenced updates, including the physical switch, firewall and load balancer. Manual configuration adds delay, which is often much longer than the time it takes to spin up a new virtual server.

• Daily tasks like IP address assignment must be coordinated. Mistakes can be hard to track down in a constantly changing environment.

• Troubleshooting problems often involves correlating logs and alerts from multiple sources. With virtualized systems, there's often a gap between the physical and virtual systems where data must be matched by hand.