Server virtualization is being implemented to gain the benefits of server consolidation, including improved server and storage utilization, operational agility, business resilience for mission-critical applications, and lower data center operating costs. With virtualization, workloads share a common pool of physical resources. ESG research found that 66% of survey respondents have implemented server virtualization and of those, 43% are using it to run production workloads.

While ESG found that top server virtualization initiatives in 2009 include expanding both server virtualization and the number of applications running in virtual machines, leveraging virtual machines for disaster recovery (DR), and improving backup of virtual machines are also high on the list. IT organizations need to guard against interruption of services as they run more virtual machines and more mission-critical applications on virtual machines.