John Abdelmalak, director of technology for the School District of the Chathams, was pretty sure it was time to jump on the virtualization bandwagon last year when he invited Dell to conduct a readiness assessment of his district's servers. When he saw just how little of their capacity was being used, he lost all doubt. Abdelmalak is one of many K-12 technology managers who are starting to regard virtualization as a must-have technology for their cash-strapped districts looking to do much more with much less. In response, vendors have begun targeting the K-12 market with specialized virtualization offerings. Dell is one of the most conspicuous, reaching out to potential customers with K-12-specific virtualization programs, and supporting them with targeted online resources. "Nowadays, when schools begin to look at how to reduce costs and increase productivity," says Mark Weston, education strategist for Dell, "those concerns drive them into a conversation about virtualization." The ability to consolidate server resources, as Abdelmalak and his team are doing at the Chathams, made virtualization a big hit in enterprise environments. And in K-12 districts, server consolidation is also a popular use of the technology. But unlike the enterprise, early K-12 adopters seem just as interested in application virtualization and desktop virtualization.