Moiz Kohari, head of cloud computing at Novell, said in a recent interview that the cloud is not yet ready to integrate all functions of a business IT department.

Speaking to ZDNet Asia, Kohari said that "current cloud [offerings] only work on infrastructure that’s already virtualized … [Cloud apps developers] expect basic virtualized infrastructure to already be in place. Cloud infrastructure providers must then ensure their hybrid environments – of virtualized and non-virtualized servers – work ‘on demand.’"

Kohari also cited the hypervisor input/output latency issues as a problem with cloud architectures, and one of the other reasons that they could sap download speed and performance.

Virtualization has become a legal battlefield as well as an IT one, said Reuters, which reported earlier this week that Oracle had filed a lawsuit against a smaller competitor, claiming patent infringement. That company sued rival SAP over similar claims, and will go to court in November.

The required virtualization can be a time-consuming process, according to Macworld’s Rob Griffiths. Griffiths recently constructed a virtual Windows machine on a Mac – a task that took him, he says, several months, when factoring in testing time and Windows updates.