Speaking at Gartner's infrastructure, operations and data center summit in Sydney, Bittman said the number of virtual machines will rise from 500,000 currently in use to three million by 2009.

However, he said it will be an expensive exercise for businesses and told IT managers to "stick it out" until the problems with virtualization, such as licensing, support and emerging technologies are ironed-out.

"There aren't many good virtualization vendors out there at the moment and virtualization is still expensive," Bittman said, adding that virtualization will be a free service in the near future.

He said business should build a strong data center governance strategy to fend-off vendors which will begin vying for third party managerial control of virtualization.

"Vendors will be competing for [data center] governance so you need to have a solid strategy," Bittman said.

"Don't allow VMWare, IBM and Microsoft to own your governance because none of them have been able to totally deliver virtualization yet and you don't want to be locked in."

Gartner senior analyst, Phil Sargent, said virtualization will be part of nearly every aspect of IT by 2015 and recommended IT managers query vendors now about how they will accommodate their application with the new technology.

"Virtualization will bring more consumer client applications into the data center which needs to be discussed with vendors as well," Sargent said.

"There are still [problems] with virtualization in support and software licensing and not everything can be virtualized; this will clear-up over the next two to four years."

Real Time Infrastructure (RTI), a term coined by Gartner, encapsulates the benefits in improved data center policies, SLAs, agility and cost derived from sharing infrastructure resources between businesses and internal departments.

SOA and Web services, as a part of RTI, could become a "nightmare" for data centers as businesses and vendors explore the model, according to Bittman.

He said application failure will be the number one cause of unplanned downtime and will increase in businesses that use SOAs.

He cited Gartner statistics which found unplanned downtime in SOA-based businesses with be caused by application failure (60 percent), operator error (20 percent), and environmental factors (20 percent).

In contrast, unplanned downtime in non SOA-base business will be caused by application failure (40 percent), operator error (40 percent), and environmental factors (20 percent).

He said the cumbersome RTI offerings of big companies like Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, and IBM will falter as small dynamic players will better appeal to the market.