Some routine functions, such as mission-critical data backup and recovery, are uncharted waters for early virtualization converts. Both VMware and Citrix Systems offer backup and recovery features, but they're for the virtual machine image itself, not the data being used by the application running inside the VM. Guaranteeing the live data means going to third parties, such as Hewlett-Packard or Marathon Technologies.

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Rich Napolitano of EMC Storage Division explains some new products from EMC in the area of deduplication.

In the physical world, it's often taken for granted that the data is being backed up. In the world of VMs, host servers are so fully utilized that there are few resources left to do data backups, says HP's Jen Tisevich, product marketing manager for Data Protector. The rub: Companies need to use the HP Enterprise Virtual Array storage system to take advantage of the feature.

HP is just one of the vendors that's adding value--and complexity--to the consolidated, virtualized server. At VMworld, Citrix will announce version 5 of its XenServer hypervisor. To achieve 99.999% availability, XenServer 5 can be combined with Marathon's EverRun high-availability product for application failover and data preservation while running VMs, says Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix's XenSource division. But you need to be a XenServer 5 Enterprise- or Platinum-level customer for the two to work together.

Some complexities are just starting to surface. If you're considering managing lots of virtual machines as a virtual data center, and operating under a service-oriented architecture, what might that mean for your services to partners and customers? Part of the application is in a VM on one server, part on another. In a virtual world, how do you get a consolidated view of an enterprise application?

Nobody's talking about that yet, with the possible exception of little-known, 2-year-old BlueStripe, whose FactFinder product is designed to discover and map dependencies of SOA-type applications in VMs, then present a consolidated view of application performance. In its first iteration, it only tracks application pieces running in VMware virtual machines.

The big vendors are starting to tout their management software's ability to manage VMs from multiple vendors. But to get all they want, from backup to visibility, IT managers for some time will be cobbling together their own combinations.