If you haven’t yet virtualized the servers in your data center environment, there’s lots of reasons to do it, firms such as IDC and Gartner say.
Virtualizing servers lets you reclaim data center floor space and save on power and cooling. In addition, IDC says that virtualization lets IT administrators save, copy and provision virtual machines quickly. It lets virtual machines share resources that are often idle, resulting in better performance.
In the area of disaster recovery, virtualization enables easy and automatic server failover when a virtual machine fails.
IDC says 50% of virtual machines are used in production environments, a number that is likely to increase as administrators trust virtualization more. By 2010 IDC says spending on virtualization will amount to $20 billion.
According to IDC’s most recent Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker, virtualization licenses increased 53% year over year — a telling tale of the popularity of virtualization. Sixty percent year over year growth occurred with x86 servers, while the EPIC — Itanium — server market experienced 18% growth. RISC and CISC virtualization licenses declined by 15% and 7% year over year.
What’s best about this research is it shows that new server shipments virtualized increase 52% year over year and that virtualization software grew 39% year over year.
For vendors shipping servers that are virtualized, HP took on the top spot with 34% market share with Dell following with 25%. IBM, which trailed in the third spot with 16% market share, saw growth of RISC-based virtualized servers.
Of course, VMware dominated in software revenue with market share of 78%. In spite of its first quarter of availability and measurement, Microsoft’s Hyper-V showed a 23% market share.
Gartner’s view of the virtualizations market is just as rosy. The research firm says that between 2007 and 2011, the number of installed virtual machines will increase more than 10fold — from less than $5 million in 2007 to more than $660 million in 2011 — and that in 2012, the majority of application workloads will run within a virtual machine.
Bring on virtualization if you haven’t already.
