Any new wave that causes disruption of IT infrastructure gives end users a chance to reevaluate their choices. Server virtualization – which took root in large enterprises with expansive (and expensive) data centers – is now beginning to deliver functional and economic benefits to nearly all classes of enterprises willing to take the virtualization plunge, down to and including organizations with just a few hundred seats. Compared with the traditional approach of buying more physical servers to keep up with application workloads, virtual machines are less expensive to purchase, deploy and manage.

In other words, virtualization software solutions like VMware®, Microsoft’s® Hyper-V and Citrix’s Xen® are rapidly gaining footholds in all sizes and shapes of IT departments because they let organizations do more with less.