And even if you never thought about virtualization much before, you probably will soon. Industry analysts say virtualization is one of the top technologies that CIOs will invest in this year, especially at firms interested in reducing real estate costs.

According to research from Hewlett-Packard Development Co. and Palo Alto, CA-based Vmware Inc., virtualization reduces the cost of both hardware acquisition and data center real estate costs. Moving to a virtual environment reduces the number of physical servers necessary to support a company's infrastructure. And that can result in smaller data centers or at least minimize the need to expand existing ones.

"With building costs ranging from $800 per sf to a projected $5,000 per sf n 2009, this is a very important area for cost savings, especially when one considers that each rack of servers or storage requires approximately seven sf," the companies state in a jointly prepared white paper.

But how do companies make the transition? When it comes to migrating physical servers to virtual machines, many IT pros argue that getting there is not half the fun. Too often, they report, the conversion process is frustrating, confusing and time-consuming.

To that end, Vizioncore , a Buffalo Grove, IL-based developer of software for virtual environments, came up with 10 tips for successful server migration. Here are the highlights:

• Assess immediate and future needs. Scalability and speed are two of the biggest differentiators among conversion solutions.
• Establish timelines, deadlines and budgets. Consider total conversion time and simultaneous conversion capacity.
• Determine whether your staff has the skills and time to execute the conversion.
• Decide how many failed conversions you can withstand. Then set a success rate goal and use it to help evaluate options.
• Learn the four basic conversion options and the advantages and limitations of each one.
• Estimate the time each method will take. Different approaches create big differences in the amount of time the process takes.
• Conversion times go down and success rates go up when physical servers are effectively prepared in advance.
• Automate execution as much as possible, since executing each conversion step takes from 30 minutes to 20 hours.
• Verify and test newly-converted virtual machines to assure no errors occurred during the conversion.
• Consider how many times you'll have to repeat the process. Some solutions have features to eliminate the redundancy for converting dozens or hundreds of physical servers.

He says companies should consider the end-to-end conversion time when evaluating different approaches, so they can determine which tasks they need their conversion solution to handle and which is most appropriate for their operations.