In this eWeek article, John Humphreys, IDC's program director for enterprise virtualization syas "In the next 18 months, virtualization will enter a "2.0" phase. According to him, virtualization will be a sought-after tool for companies looking to plan for business continuity and disaster recovery. He even gives a metric: "...about 50 percent of virtualization will involve HADR (high-availability disaster recovery)".
Agreed. I'm looking into going heavily into virtualization where I'm working. The promise has become that you can finally detach the "server" from the "box" and move it on-demand to where the resources are.
it makes for some interesting IA policy questions and it takes a lot of hardware infrastructure to pull it off, but it is an interesting promise.