IT, by nature, is innovative - changing and adapting to remove the constraints of manual business operations and streamline the efficiency of organization. To adopt the mentality of "set it and forget it" with your technology is a sure way to tell your clients "we are resolved to becoming outdated and inferior." At the same time, the industry has taught us that technology for technology's sake is not a sound business model either. Keeping up with trends in the technology world becomes an even more overwhelming challenge for with every new, in vogue capability, there are countless iterations already in incubation. So, how do CIO's and IT executives stay ahead of the curve to ensure systems will grow with an organization and protect valuable capital from being flushed away? Server Virtualization is a prime example of what was once looked upon skeptically as an interesting attempt to change the way IT managed cost and systems until it was proven prudent and lucrative by Fortune 500 firms across the spectrum. Now however, companies are out of license compliance, and have lost control and visibility into the enterprise.

There are two fundamental approaches to moving data through a network of links and switches: circuit switching and packet switching. In circuit-switched networks, the resources needed along a path (buffets, link transmission rate) to provide for communication between the end systems are reserved for the duration of the communication session between the end-systems. In packet-switched networks, these resources are not reserved; a session's messages use the resources on demand, and as a consequence may have to wail (that is, queue) for access to a communication link. As a simple analogy, consider two restaurants, one that requires reservations and another that neither requires reservations nor accepts them. For the restaurant that requires reservations, we have to go through the hassle of calling before we leave home. But when we arrive at the restaurant we can, In principle, immediately communicate with the waiter and order our meal. For the restaurant that does not require reservations, we don't need to bother to reserve a table. But when we arrive at the restaurant, we may have to wait for a table before we can communicate with the waiter.