Daily Tech Report

With the recent release of MIcrosoft’s Hyper-V virtualization product, the question mark for market leader VMWare is whether it will lose market share to the Redmond giant at a time when the market for virtualization is seemingly on the rise. Market data from research firm IDC may help to shed light on the subject, and suggests that the technology is finally starting to gain some traction with companies. According to IDC, “Virtualisation use has exploded since our last survey of the European market. Both large organisations and smaller businesses are using the technology for a wider range of applications”.

• 35% of the servers bought in 2007 were virtualized, while 52% of the servers that will be bought in 2008 will be virtualized. This points to rapid penetration of virtualization within organizations that have chosen to test the technology.
• 54% of those not using virtualization will be doing so within the next 18 months. Increased exposure of enterprises to virtualization should blossom as the tools get more robust (particularly in the area of business continuity), and more IT professionals well-versed in the technology should also help to get more companies using the technology to some extent.
• Most organizations are using virtualization for consolidation of core business applications. While testing and development applications is a natural fit for virtualization (since a complete test machine can be saved as one big file known as a virtual machine), the consolidation of key business apps is seemingly the low hanging fruit at present for most organizations. The ability to consolidate multiple underutilized business servers into a single server is perhaps an easier business benefit to quantify initially.
• From a share perspective, VMWare leads the pack at 82%, with various UNIX technologies comparising 14% share (which includes Citrix’s Xen), and 13% for Microsoft. Xen only holds a 3% share, which is surprising given that almost half of web servers are Linux-based. This implies that Linux servers are being virtualized to a much smaller degree than Windows servers. This may be related to Linux’s relatively strong resilience to crashing and viruses relative to Windows servers - as a result, IT managers may not be seeing the need to consolidate Linux machines on a single platform using virtualization.

Looking ahead, IDC sees that the near-term focus for enterprises will be on business continuit (disaster recovery and backup) and on increased availability of resources - two areas where VMWare outperforms Microsoft. Recall that Microsoft’s Hyper-V solution is still a 1.0 release of virtualization, and cannot replicate key pieces of VMWare functionality like on-the-fly reallocations of virtual machines (moving virtual machines from one server to another) and on-the-fly addition of system resources like storage.

The bottom line is that Microsoft’s Hyper-V is not really ready for prime time as it isn’t addressing what enterprises need from virtualization over the coming 12-18 months.