The main advantage of virtualization technologies is that they help small businesses to lower costs for infrastructure, hardware, power and cooling. At the same time the system performance of a virtualized infrastructure may less effective than consumers expect. It is the same for costs. They might not be cut as much as It managers expect. The most important thing in process of managing a virtual infrastructure is businesses to improve the performance of their applications.

According to Bojan Simic, an analyst at research firm Aberdeen the management of virtual infrastructures is difficult because there is a lack of tools which enable companies to monitor and analyze virtual environments.

Aberdeen conducted a survey among 137 enterprises in December 2008 which found that IT companies manage much better their business-critical applications in physical environment than in virtualized one.

"If organizations don't have capabilities in place for the effective management of application performance, some of the benefits of virtualization could diminish," Simic said for Internet News.

The analytical agency predicts that some businesses may be unsatisfied of their investment in virtual infrastructure if they haven't calculated very precisely the results that the virtualization technologies can bring, especially in reducing data center costs and improving efficiency and utilization.

The study also found that keeping business-critical applications at peak performance may be harder in virtual environments. For example, when using tools to manage business-critical applications in physical environments, 62% of the companies participated to the survey reported improved mean time between repairs (MTBR). That figure dropped to 32% in the virtualized environment.

Aberdeen's analysts had an 85% success rate in identifying performance issues before they impacted end users, but only in setups that relied on a physical environment. The rate for virtual environments was 37%. 67% of participants say they have seen an improved application response times when managing business-critical applications in the physical environment, while the figure for virtualized environments was 39%.

Find more in Aberdeen's website as well as in
"Virtualization: Doing More Harm Than Good?".