Cisco brings up an interesting topic on how to accelerate Virtual Machines.

TechWiseTV
Accelerating Virtual Machines
Thursday, October 23, 2008, 10-11 a.m. Pacific Time
Of all of the recent technology trends in the world of enterprise IT, virtualization may be the most profound. Almost every organization is implementing virtualization. However, most have not moved beyond the server consolidation stage. How can you take it to the logical next level, without creating serious management, control, and security issues?

This TechWiseTV episode reveals the expertise and the latest solutions that will enable you to virtualize your entire network infrastructure. Learn how Cisco is delivering the capability to provision and manage services with virtual machine–level granularity. See how these new solutions provide for quality of service, storage management, and security capabilities at the hypervisor layer. Watch TechWiseTV and see the newest virtualization technologies and services, including:

This makes sense as a step after server consolidation for many, even though ideally people would think about these issues before starting a virtualization project.

Virtualization assessment, planning, and design services, available jointly from Cisco and VMware, to help you define the next steps in your virtualization strategy