NetQoS and Network Instruments polled attendees at Interop yesterday; to try to find out the network’s greatest management challenges. Close to 80% of attendees are either using virtualization now or planning to use virtualization in 12 months, and a plurality of respondents – 38% - said the virtualization presented the greatest monitoring challenges.

What’s interesting about this is the idea that virtualization may simplify application development and hardware maintenance, but it complicates network management greatly. Keeping track of the traffic between Server A and Server B isn’t enough, now there’s Server A, Image 1, Server A, Image 2, Server B, Image 1, Server B, Image 2 and so on. So there’s the A-B traffic, the A1-B1 traffic, the A1-B2 traffic, and the internal traffic of A1-A2 and B1-B2. You get the idea.

Considering that virtualization is one of the key themes of this year’s Interop, the poll simply puts an underline for emphasis under virtualization’s widespread adoption.

This is not to say that virtualization is the only challenge facing IT groups in the present and near future. 24% of those polled said that unified communications was going to be challenging to monitor, and 14% said the same thing of MPLS.

Of course, just because this year presents new challenges doesn’t mean that challenges that were new last year have gone away; 67% of companies surveyed have rolled out VoIP, and 42% have WAN Optimization of some sort.