The pressure on IT to deliver more using fewer resources is not going away no matter what happens with the economy. The analyst firm Gartner expects more than 60% of server workloads to be virtualized within the next three years, up from today’s estimated range of 15% to 20%. What’s more, virtualization is going to spread rapidly to a broader cross section of mission-critical functions - think virtualized corporate databases, corporate finance and all of your company’s various homegrown applications. In a recent survey by InformationWeek, 73% of IT professionals said they will either continue to do server virtualization in 2010 or they are more likely to do it to improve overall IT efficiency.

So what should IT do to prepare for this inevitable invasion of server virtualization? How are you going to get from 20% virtualization to 60% virtualization in three years or less? The first and by far most critical step is to make sure that you have in place an infrastructure that is optimized for virtualization.

This paper discusses:

• A guide to rolling out virtual-ready infrastructure
• What you should look for in a solution
• The Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM)
• And more