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Users Share Virtualization Pitfalls: Page 8 of 9

He also suggests calling on the vendor for its expertise and to train staff. "Definitely get some training to figure out the backup maze," Beard advises.

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Virtualization customers should take full advantage of their vendors' and VARs' knowledge base and training, echoes Snow of St. Joseph's Hospital. The Syracuse, N.Y., health care facility has 40 virtual servers with VMware's ESX 3 software. "Get the lead [project manager] to one of their five-day classes," he says.

Snow said he and his colleagues made sure they did their homework where the technology was concerned -- maybe too much. "We had a preconceived idea of what could and could not work virtually," Snow says. "But actually, there's more you can put on VMware than we originally thought -- except we’re out of room till we order more infrastructure."

The one deployment glitch St. Joseph's experienced came with a mail gateway. "We had planned to virtualize it, and at the same time, we were going to be doing an upgrade on the mail application itself," he says. When they put it on VMware, the gateway no longer worked. The newer version of the app took too many resources, and the hospital had to calculate whether it was worth the extra overhead to virtualize it. The short answer: It wasn't, at least not for something as important as email.