I'm kind of with Grasshopper on this. We have a few dozen servers, all with direct attached storage. To go virtual, and really take advantage of high availability and disaster recovery, we would require some kind of network storage. The recommendation also seems to be to go with servers that have virtualization built into them, which means our existing servers will be retired. All of this means we would need to invest significant dollars in hardware.

The argument of going green falls on deaf ears around here. As a manufacturing facility we have machines that use enormous amount of electricity which dwarfs what we consume in IT. I realize every little bit adds up, but the argument just doesn't get very far with top management.

All of this being said, we will eventually virtualize our server environment. We will start with some of the easy ones like DNS, DHCP and file/print. Our core ERP system will probably be the last one to be virtualized, and it is the one that would benefit the most in terms of high availability that virtualization would offer.

I'd be interested to here from folks who have virtualized some of their large, core systems.