Many companies, Janco's survey says, have also cut or eliminated discretionary IT budgets, pulled hiring levels for even high-demand specialties like security and virtualization back to normal levels, reduced top-IT-executive raises to something like one-and-a-half percent, and started trimming lower-level and administrative jobs.

Janco blames the recession, which undoubtedly contributes. But the same pattern also makes perfect sense in the context of the other cost savings that stem from virtualization.

Do you really need the same number (or same salary level) of admins to manage 1000 virtual servers on 200 physical servers as you do to manage 1000 actual servers? Probably not, when a good part of physical-server administration is going to make sure a non-responsive server in a branch office is still plugged in.

APC wouldn't say so explicitly, but the calculators it put up online will let you decide for itself. APC has developed a range of sophisticated guides and tools for IT managers trying to benchmark the efficiency with which their data centers use the appalling volume of electricity they burn through every year.

The rest of the industry is pitching in on the let's-save-money effort as well. Red Hat is expanding open-source v-tools, Cisco is pitching in with beefier virtual-network management, Citrix is recasting its interpretation of application virtualization, and various experts are offering their own expertise and advice on how to manage the whole virtual world.

All this is kind of catch-up. Tools and guides on virtualization have been a bit thin on the ground so far.

Neither the experts or vendors have gotten much into the blowback, and the potential negative impact of a wide-ranging, money-saving, efficiency promoting technology.

They haven't often mentioned that, once you finish your initial virtualization project, you've still got a lot of work in front of you, not only in adding the kind of management and other refinements that show up in Phase 2 of any major project, but also in adapting your IT staff and the rest of your IT resources to the virtualized infrastructure.

That's going to be really, really hard if the CEO and CFO see virtualization primarily as a way to save money, cut staff and limit IT projects that involve either capital expenses or new infrastructure.

("What do you mean we still need to upgrade the network backbone? Didn't you just cut out half the servers that were plugged into it? Why do we need to buy new servers, can't you just use the extras left over from the consolidation?")