Today, it's the early adopters in industries such as financial services that are encountering management issues with what vendors like to call "virtual machine sprawl," but the pain will spread as more companies ramp up the number of virtual servers in use between now and next year, analysts say.

"Implementing this stuff is the beginning of rethinking how you manage your IT infrastructure," says Gillett. "You won't get far without thinking about data center automation."

Sidebar

Real self-service for virtual provisioning

Virtualization technology may make provisioning of individual servers faster and easier, but the process can still take up increasing amounts of administrators' time as the number of requests increases. The most demanding groups tend to be development teams, which routinely build and tear down virtual machines as testing platforms.