The rewards of moving applications from physical systems to a virtualised world are often discussed with breathless enthusiasm. However, the potential risks of virtualisation require a sober assessment if you don’t want to see the benefits it promises squandered.

I am frequently asked about my experiences implementing and securing our virtual environment (currently 2,600 virtual machines running on 250 ESX servers in both production IT and R&D environments). Likewise, I’ve heard many war stories from peers at other organisations.