Virtualization must be the most buzzed term of 2007 within the IT industry bar none. I recently met with Joost Pronk van Hoogeveen from Sun and Ronit Belson from OpTier, an ISV partner of Sun's that provides IT apps management tools, to talk about virtualization and cut through some of the buzz and into some reality.

We boiled it down to five things you should know about IT virtualization.

1 - Understand your business application and what it does. You'd be surprised how many organizations don't even know what applications they have and on which servers they run.

2 - Assess your virtualization technologies and how they fit into your business process.

3 - Where should you compress your costs. This is different from cost savings.

4- Who owns the chargebacks? Some applications can be bigger resource hogs than you might expect.

5 - What is your backup strategy?