Quoting from SearchCIO: Many businesses are deploying virtualization technology without having the skills in place to manage it properly. As a result, there are a lot of CIOs with failed virtualization project on their hands. According to a new study from Boulder, Colo.-based research firm Enterprise management Associates (EMA), of 150 IT managers polled who had deployed virtualization, only 47% said they had sufficient skills within their company to manage virtualization. "Virtualization essentially requires an entirely new skill set," EMA's Andi Mann said. "When you're talking about deploying a physical environment like Unix, you need a Unix manager and then you deploy applications on top of that. When you do virtualization you still need all that, but you need virtualization skills as well: How to connect networks virtually as well as physically, and how to connect storage virtually as well as physically." Mann said CIOs who are adopting virtualization need to do a skills audit. He said they should also work with their vendors and with consultants to determine what skills are going to be needed... Read the whole article at source. I couldn't agree more. I already wrote in the article Indentifying must-have IT staff skills how new virtualization professionals must be a sort of super men, proving high competencies on a range of fields, from operating systems to storage technologies, from networking to security. But it's also worth to say there is a notable lack of training about virtualization from actual vendors. Availability of courses and books is insufficient and it's a real shame both VMware and Microsoft never published a book on their own technologies.