For all of virtualisations promise, organisations do not realise its full potential because virtualised environments can appear to be much more complex than traditional IT infrastructures. Just putting a hypervisor on a machine does not necessarily bring you virtualisation returns. It allows server virtualisation on applications, but it may not do much else! Try to focus on the overall picture - you ultimately want an IT infrastructure that enables services for the business at better economies of scale, better agility and low risk.

Most of today's technology practices, policies and tools were developed for a "hard-wired" physical environment. Unfortunately virtualisation challenges these. It challenges the status quo of storage silos. It changes the way you provision and connect servers, storage and networks. It changes how you monitor, manage, automate and maintain compliance of technology-enabled services, and even how you licence and purchase technology.

When all of these factors are NOT taken into account, virtualisation can introduce new challenges including:

• Server provisioning and moves get faster, but backlogs for storage and network administrators grow because these elements are still hardwired or not designed for the specific needs of virtual environments
• Monolithic IT strategies are not designed for virtualisations speed and flexibility. The old best practices create bottlenecks - forcing IT administrators to sacrifice speed, and put quality and availability of technology services at risk.
• IT specialities, virtualisation tools, and teams arise leading to parallel but segregated silos.
• Performance monitoring and problem isolation become much harder because of increased IT infrastructure complexities.
• Business continuity and data protection in a virtual environment require a new way of approaching backup and disaster recovery, as well as application failover. When we look beyond the hypervisor it becomes clear that virtualisation is part of a broader ecosystem - one that includes both physical and virtual environments.

And this ecosystem should be managed with a common set of best practices adapted to this new server environment - looking at virtualisation's role in every service element from desktop virtualisation to data centre consolidation.