Virtualization has become a core datacenter technology supporting production workloads in enterprises around the world. The widespread use of virtualization enables more efficient use of computing resources by allowing enterprises to consolidate workloads and dynamically allocate resources as needed, based on business requirements. To fully exploit the potential benefits of virtualization in enterprise datacenters, IT teams need to seamlessly integrate, automate, and standardize infrastructure operations and provisioning activities across server, storage, and network resources.

Customers need to better understand how the use of virtualization and cloud computing changes datacenter infrastructure management requirements.

The following questions were posed by Dell to Mary Johnston Turner, IDC's research director of System Management Software, on behalf of Dell's customers.