Gartner Identifies Six Best Virtualization Practices.

David Marshall's has an item from Gartner on six things every company should consider before they virtualize.

1. Start Small, Think Big
2. Require a Rapid ROI
3. Virtualize the Right Applications
4. Define Your Storage Strategy
5. Understand Software Issues
6. Combine Virtual Machines Effectively

I like that John Enck called the market "immature" - he said its still evolving and that pricing is going to change due to competition (I have to think this is Xen and Hyper-V coming to market).

When is it going to be mature - who knows - they say the Virtualization space will be "the most-important trend for servers through 2012" and that they have "have had thousands of client interactions on x86 server virtualization since 2001".

They also said their customers are asking "the most-common questions revolve around best practices for starting a server virtualization project. "

Thomas Bittman comments on the fluid, liquid pool idea of resources when he writes "enterprises will effectively leverage virtualization now and will re-architect their servers to become a more efficient, fluid pool of dynamic capacity"

Cloud, Pool, Grid, etc - all of it is going to require management to be effective.