The desire for strong tools in this area remains keen. Some 35 percent of respondents say they have tools in place for virtualization management; 48 percent say they will put these tools in place by next year.

What are some of emerging management and security management tools that should be on your radar screen? See How Server Virtualization Tools Can Balance Data Center Loads and How to Find and Fix 10 Real Security Threats on Your Virtual Servers.

Security and business intelligence tools also ranked high on the priority list, according to this survey's respondents.

Both ITIL (an IT process/best practices methodology) and IPv6 (an emerging network standard), interestingly, ranked very low: 60 percent of respondents to this survey call ITIL a middle to low priority. 73 percent call IPv6 a middle or low priority.

In a separate, recent study by research firm TheInfoPro (TIP), more than two-thirds of users view server virtualization as "critical" to achieving business objectives. And 90 percent of server professionals responding to the survey viewed virtualized servers as "the next enterprise IT server platform." TIP's Wave 5 Server Study queried 140 users at Fortune 1000 and midsize companies.

© 2008 CXO Media Inc.