In this paper we investigate the deployment of FastFlow applications on multi-core virtual platforms. The overhead introduced by the virtual environment has been measured using a well-known application benchmark both in the sequential and in the FastFlow parallel setting. The overhead introduced for both the sequential and the parallel executions of CPU and memory-intensive applications is in the range of 2-30%, while the execution speedup is almost preserved. Additionally, we have ported the FastFlow benchmark to a cloud-based distributed environment in which a task-intensive application has been tested and the performance compared with the corresponding run on a smaller cluster of multi-core machines without virtualisation. From a parallel programming perspective, we have demonstrated how a unique programming framework based on the structured parallel programming paradigm can cope with very different kind of target architectures without any (or minimal) code intervention.