20 Nov 2009

Lessons for virtual environments

Businesses planning to employ or simply fine tune their virtual environments have been advised on some key lessons which should be learnt.

Mark Hermeling, senior product manager for multicore and virtualisation at Wind River, noted in an article for Electronics Weekly that when setting up new systems, firms should be aware of operating system choices and security.

In addition, they might like to consider consolidation by reducing the number of processors in a system, thereby reducing power consumption and cost.

He wrote: "The most accurate benchmark is one that is derived from your application, a test-suite that measures the performance of the application on the configuration and reports the numbers that are relevant to you."

Elsewhere, Heidi Biggar, solution marketing principal at Hitachi Data Systems, recently noted research carried out by the company showed that more than half of all businesses which employ more than 5,000 members of staff have turned to virtualisation to make disaster recovery easier.