Market Shift

Frequently we've had people tell us that virtualization is still in the "experimental" stage and not yet generally deployed in production environments. That might have been the case a couple of years ago but today there are more than enough production virtualization case studies to validate the claim of the production readiness of virtualization. Last week's VMworld with 14,000 attendees provided ample proof of virtualization's production deployment status. VMware handed out the results of its periodic customer research survey which shows EMX production deployment at 94% of its customers -- a remarkably high deployment rate -- and that 47% of VMware's customers use virtualization as the "default build" for new server deployments (up from 25% in 2007). What's more, their survey showed an increase in the percentage of customers who run in production virtualized versions of higher payload applications like databases and Microsoft Exchange. The more significant change from VMware users is that their CIOs are asking the question -- "What are you going to do for me this year?" These CIOs like the initial returns from virtualization but now want incremental improvements from datacenter operations -- like improved server consolidation ratios, improved management, Disaster Recovery, High Availability, Fault Tolerance... Now that the initial virtualization steps are underway, the market is shifting to operational improvements. So if you think the market is still experimenting with virtualization, you're likely to miss what's actually happening.