What is Next in Virtualisation?

From a technology point of view, organisations must look beyond the hypervisor and address all the components of the infrastructure that virtualisation has an impact on; such as networks, backup, storage and disaster recovery.

Many pilots simply test the smaller, easy to virtualise, candidates and only focus on performance at the application and operating system layer which often produces unrealistic results.

Organisations must have test strategies that include the full range of potential configurations. This will ensure the infrastructure has the capacity to scale in order to meet the demands of larger workloads as and when they are virtualised.

The classic example of this being storage input/output, where cheaper storage technologies are implemented and VMs perform as expected during the pilot but performance can decline significantly once the infrastructure is loaded or VMs with heavier workloads are introduced.

With an operational strategy and ‘bigger picture’ approach to virtualisation technology planning organisations won’t need to making a leap of faith, they can just cross the bridge to a better place.