According to Abbene, as long as you don’t overburden physical servers with too many VMs, you won’t notice any degradation in application availability. And as long as applications are running just fine, “they don’t need to know what box [their applications] are running on.” Despite serious growth at the $2.5 billion company over the past three years, Abbene reduced his overall budget by 10 percent to 15 percent a year, largely due to his server virtualization efforts.

In fact, Abbene says that at his company, many businesspeople have become enamored of the virtualization concept. “They’ll say, ‘I want a virtualized server,’” he says.

What the Business Doesn’t Need to Know
That first win and proof of concept with server consolidation invariably lead to more virtualization conversations, say CIOs and analysts. CIOs should seize on these second-round discussions to expand upon how virtualization can provide greater flexibility and speed in provisioning computing power to lines of business (LOBs), allow for greater utilization of idle CPUs, speed up business continuity and disaster recovery operations, and improve application and system availability.

But, experts and practitioners say, you should take it slow and keep it simple. That’s because even many who work inside IT still have difficulty understanding all of virtualization’s complex terminology—just imagine how your CFO or marketing VP will feel if you start discussing hypervisors and CPUs. (Hint: Eyes glazing over, furious typing on BlackBerry.)

“They have no idea what that all means,” says Matt Wilson, vice president of IS at Chevy Chase Bank, which has $14 billion in assets. “As long as [their servers] perform well, they have no input into it.” When Wilson has moved Windows-based servers over to virtual machines in the past, he says, “it’s not something that we’ve advertised to the business.”

In fact, IDC’s Elliot says he’s talked to some CIOs who have hidden the fact that they have virtualized their servers (and realized cost savings) altogether. “They don’t want to spook anybody with tech jargon,” Elliot says. In a rather subtle way, he says, it’s conceivable that those CIOs who don’t inform the LOBs about their virtualized savings are actually able to make a “profit” on those services because of the virtualized savings. “If you can get away with that,” Elliot cautions.

This sneaking around is, in part, a response to the fact that some LOB chiefs have become married to their servers. These executives are “server huggers,” and they can be very territorial about their boxes. But it’s those server huggers, and their demands for loads of computing power for their applications, who are one of the chief causes of server sprawl in the CIOs’ data centers.