Deciding whether a given application requires this level of investment is an exercise in risk assessment. Certainly this should be an explicit exercise, in which the tradeoffs between business exposure, investment, and technical operations complexity are evaluated. It's no easy exercise, and there probably aren't any easy answers. However, doing this is much more likely to result in an acceptable outcome than an extended, though futile, SLA contract slugfest.
Bernard Golden is CEO of consulting firm HyperStratus, which specializes in virtualization, cloud computing and related issues. He is also the author of "Virtualization for Dummies," the best-selling book on virtualization to date.
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