Rick Says

#2: Storage and networking will be your biggest pain points

Planning a server virtualization implementation of any scale will require a lot of planning in the areas of storage and networking. In a server virtualization strategy, the migration from local storage to shared centralized storage takes adequate sizing and planning. Further, administrators will be challenged to rethink the provisioning of virtual servers.

From our experience Rick is dead on.  We have done hundreds of deployments in Education, Corporate, Wndows, Novell and Mac environments and going to a centralized storage solution allows our customers better performance, productivity and manageability but it makes the administrator rethink how they support their end users.  The planning portion of this process is vital and collaborative as it allows the Administrator to fully comprehend the reach of virtualization and the indirect and the direct savings while we customize the best solution.