The tools businesses need to be able to manage a virtualized data center are coming, though they haven't arrived yet, according to a panel of industry executives. What's more, IT may not know what to do with them when they get here.

LOS ANGELES (BetaNews) - The most obvious effects of virtualization in the data center, most experts have predicted, is a radical consolidation of processing power. Today, most server processors use about 5% of their total processing capacity. Engineers at Microsoft expect that figure to grow to as high as 60%, once operating systems such as Windows Server 2008 and built-in virtualization hardware on both AMD and Intel CPUs, are deployed in big business' data centers.

Nobody doubts that virtualization can work. But the roadblock IT shops are facing, according to AMD corporate vice president Randy Allen, is that CIOs don't yet trust their own IT shops to be able to manage the task of deploying virtualization.

"The thing you gotta remember is, the industry's not there yet in [terms of] simplification," Allen told a panel of industry executives convened last week by Microsoft. "I was talking with a CIO recently, one of our end users...about the success we'd had in deploying virtualization... He said, 'I would love to take advantage. I am sold on the benefits. But I am not at the point where I can trust my IT staff to pull it off, given all the risks that's embodied.' And he was very clear that that was the primary barrier. He didn't need more selling on the benefits of it; he just needed the solution to be more simple."

"The reality is that, the situation in enterprises is, it is heterogeneous and it's going to stay heterogenous in the future." Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President, Server and Tools Business, Microsoft

The opportunity actually exists for very radical simplification on account of virtualization, argued Dell vice president for Enterprise Software and Solutions Rick Becker. "In terms of server migration and server consolidation -- in fact, delivering any of their lifecycle management -- if we had ubiquitous virtualization, and the ability to drive it very hard, we have an opportunity to take complexity out of the entire lifecycle management, so that now you kind of have 'virtual machine buckets' solutions sets."

By selling solutions in these "buckets," Becker suggested, customers could receive built-in services when they purchase their servers, rather than hardware vendors injecting those services into the product lifecycle over a five-year period...typically at much greater costs, for both the vendor and the customer. So in the same manner that insurance companies are educating their prospective customers with regard to topics such as job safety and defensive driving, Dell has begun educating its customers as to the potential benefits of virtualization in the data center.

"I was talking with a CIO recently...He said, 'I would love to take advantage. I am sold on the benefits. But I am not at the point where I can trust my IT staff to pull it off, given all the risks that's embodied."' Randy Allen, Corporate Vice President, Server and Workstation Division, AMD

That education will require bringing different business divisions together on a common goal, which HP executive vice president for its Technology Solutions Group, James Mouton, doesn't see as all that easy a process. In different companies, there are storage, network, server groups, and other departments, all of which have to be brought together, he said. But after they're all done sharing buzzwords, the challenge is turning their collective attention to the business process at hand.

"It's making that link, when you have a business process that needs some more capacity, makes it automated to the point where the process says, 'Okay, I need to go add another server to the Exchange pool,"' remarked Mouton. "So the end result is really that business service policy is not about uptime of the server specifically. Even the metrics of what you think about need to change."

Next: Microsoft admits the world is forever heterogeneous...