Research Report: The Evolution of Server Virtualization
ESG Research Report

Nov 19, 2010
In order to assess the current state of the server virtualization market, ESG recently surveyed 463 North America-based senior IT professionals representing large midmarket (500 to 999 employees) and enterprise-class (1,000 employees or more) organizations. All respondents were personally responsible for managing or overseeing IT products, services, and strategies and their organizations had to be current users of server virtualization technology. Additionally, respondents were required to have in-depth knowledge of at least one virtualization adjacent technology area—including server, storage, and networking infrastructure; information security; or business applications—in the context of server virtualization technology.

Specifically, ESG’s survey asked:
  • What is the current state of server virtualization deployments? For example, what percentage of servers has actually been virtualized to date? How many different applications are being run in virtual environments? Are most virtual machines run in production or test/development environments?
  • How do users expect these metrics to change over the next 24 months?
  • What specific applications and workloads have been virtualized to date? Are users satisfied with their progress with respect to deploying tier-1 applications on virtual servers?
  • How satisfied are organizations with their server virtualization initiatives?
  • What benefits have organization realized as a result of deploying server virtualization technology?
  • What metrics do organizations use to gauge their success with server virtualization?
  • What challenges do organizations still face when it comes to server virtualization?
  • How has virtualization changed organizations’ IT infrastructure processes?
  • How is virtualization technology impacting organizations’ infrastructure management processes and tools?
  • What are the critical factors that respondents believe are preventing their organization from using virtualization technology more pervasively? What developments need to take place in order to enable more widespread server virtualization usage?
  • How do the answers to these questions vary by IT functional group—i.e., what are the key challenges and virtualization enablers in terms of server, storage, networking, security, and application perspectives?
  • Are certain organizations further along in their server virtualization sophistication and success and, if so, why? What are the characteristics and best practices that separate these organizations from the rest of the market? What steps can organizations take to move further along the virtualization maturity curve?
 

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