The buzz surrounding virtualization is positively electric.

From Wall Street fawning over VMware to a mostly warm reception from techies, the technology is on a roll. Heck, even Microsoft is diving in.

But before you start drawing up lofty plans, you should be aware that virtualization is not quite the magic bullet. At least not yet.

Most all organizations are still understandably reluctant to place "mission critical" apps on virtual servers. And this article over at Datamation sheds some light on why.

Perhaps the final challenge is total system failure. Because virtualized companies run multiple technologies off one device, failure can wreak havoc on a whole segment of a network. This can cause isolated service disruptions—a reality that Andrew Barnes, senior vice president of corporate development at Neverfail (Neverfail, a disaster recovery company in Austin, Texas, said businesses must recognize.

“One of the biggest misconceptions regarding virtualization is that true disaster recovery and high availability are built into the products offered by the major virtualization software vendors,” said Barnes. “The fact is that companies need to handle much of this on their own.”

Infrastructure build out and management overhead are also factors to take into account. Though at least on the management side, I’ve noticed in my talks with some vendors that they are starting to blur the lines between VMs and any other physical networked resource.

Read the rest of Matt Villano's virtualization primer for more perspectives.