Embarking on a virtualization project can be tricky. Where to start? Baseline asked some experts to recount the lessons they learned in virtualizing servers—and how those experiences can help you.

PLAN

Cutting costs is great, but make sure you have ample hard drive space and memory. Take it from Karl Fisher, systems engineer with All Systems Integration of Woburn, Mass. He says his systems integration firm underestimated how many gigabytes of space it would need for its virtual machines as well as how much memory some applications required. Getting up to par didn't cost much, Fisher says, but it took some time. In light of that, doubling your expected capacity is a wise move.

WEIGH OPTIONS

Instead of mixing and matching, get the right recipe. Brian Heagney, data center manager with CoAMS, a trade promotion consulting firm, urges his fellow technologists to research which hardware works with the different virtualization engines and their operating systems. "The same hardware will scale differently [with different software] and that can determine the up-front cost savings," Heagney says. After all, if everything worked together perfectly, there wouldn't be any competition.

EVALUATE

Read the brochures, listen to the sales pitches—but nothing beats taking the product for a spin. "The best way to evaluate is to have the vendors set up test systems and run similar virtual machines on the competing products," says Tim Smith, director of humanities information systems at The Ohio State University. Testing VMware's ESX Server helped Smith get comfortable with—among other things—the software's P2V provisioning capability, which moves information from physical boxes onto new virtual machines.

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