Most disruptive technologies deliver big savings only when they're first implemented, but enterprise customers keep wringing more ROI from virtualization, analysts say. As for how to get the most from virtualization plus cloud, confusion still reigns.

While the newest version of VMware's (VMW) vSphere virtualization suite (see review  here) represents a big step toward practical cloud computing, virtualization technology continues to spread based on the same basic benefits that made it popular in the first place, analysts say.

Virtualization makes it so much easier to consolidate a company's inventory of servers and maintain them that it sometimes justifies its own cost through more than one cycle of upgrades.

"We had one client that was able to justify a complete server hardware refresh because it could upgrade without having to buy any additional VMware server licenses," according to Chris Wolf, infrastructure analyst for Gartner Group. "They moved from servers with four cores to servers with 12 cores and were able to run more VMs on fewer servers at a significant cost savings." (...)

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