DISQUS

Congratulations on two great years! Keep up the great content, and we are looking forward to the virtualization hints guide. We are especially interested in the link between virtualization and better testing.

Hi Martin. I like the new look of the blog.

Virtualization definitely can be used to improve site functionality and availability, but the testing conducted during upgrades needs to take this into account. Greater complexity can add to the risk of problems in production caused by changes.

Carl Claunch's comment that virtualization is a "swiss army knife" is an interesting take. It seems many uses beyond server consolidation are gaining media and analyst attention. Storage, for example, is talked about in this article, http://www.cio.in/esntech/viewArticle/ARTICLEID...

Another good study, Martin...keep them coming.

Would agree that applications - and more specifically changes to applications - contribute significantly to downtime. Certain "change management maturity" activities – automating change management, regularly scheduling changes, adopting change management processes like ITIL etc. – can help companies limit the problems that changes cause in production. As complexity grows in IT Operations, this situation will become more challenging.

The research my company did on this subject can be found at www.stacksafe.com/research

Interesting announcement from Aberdeen. However, it ignores the possibilities of virtualization as a tool to help address the business continuity challenge. To reduce the cost of staging, advanced companies can import their systems into a virtualized environment and conduct “what if” analysis to understand how back-up systems will perform if primary systems fail. This can be done regardless of whether an organization uses virtualization or not in the operations environment.