According to a recent survey conducted by US analyst house Yankee Group, server virtualization is catching on in the enterprise. The recent poll of 1,700 managers and executives from around the globe has released some real eye-opening statistics.

The survey results suggest that three out of four companies, regardless of size, already have or plan to deploy server virtualization technologies over the next 12 months.

Of those companies, nearly two-thirds (62%) already have a virtualization solution in place or are in the process of migrating, while 21% plan on implementing the technology within the next 12 months. Only 4% of the respondents said they actually had no plans to implement a virtualization solution in their environment.

Reducing infrastructure costs was the primary reason cited by 43% of companies for installing the technology, and half of those who have already deployed server virtualization indicated that they had already reduced costs as a result of the move. Other reasons cited for implementing virtualization included ease of application deployments (18%), improving server utilization rates (15%), consolidating physical floor space (12%), and to increase server and application provisioning times (10%). Nearly half of the respondents also claimed that disaster recovery benefits were also a huge factor in moving to a virtualized solution.

Interestingly, the survey also found that VMware is the clear and convincing market leader. 45% of the respondents are deploying or plan to use VMware's ESX Server platform, while another 10% will use VMware GSX Server (now VMware Server). This seems to suggest that VMware has or will maintain a 55% market share over the next 12 to 15 months. Microsoft comes in a close second with around 29% of the market share with its Microsoft Virtual Server platform. Other server virtualization solutions such as XenSource, XenOptimizer built into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell SUSE are found to be very small niche market solutions where each has only about 1% of the market share.

Posted by David Marshall on July 4, 2006 07:57 AM