Just under 40 per cent of all enterprise servers have now been virtualised, according to new figures from virtualisation management specialist Veeam.
The VMware tech partner has taken the pulse of the virtualisation sector to mark the launch of its V-Index portal, a free-to-air resource designed to allow users to track the penetration rate of virtualisation across large enterprise server estates.
Veeam said it hopes to develop the portal into a community resource to enable partners and end-users to get a more consistent view of the impact of the technology and, according to CEO Ratmir Timashev, "grant an understanding both of virtualisation's progress towards becoming the defacto IT platform and the obstacles in its way."
The firm teamed up with number crunchers at Vanson Bourne to quiz 544 firms in the US, UK, France and Germany, and found that although 60 per cent of servers remained untouched by virtualisation, 91.9 per cent of all enterprises were using virtualisation to some degree.
Of those businesses, each had on average 470 virtual machines and 113 physical hosts. The average perceived virtual to physical consolidation ratio was 9.8 virtual machines to one physical host, although when calculated on an individual enterprise basis, this figure dropped to 6.3.
The most popular hypervisor platform was, predictably, VMware, with 84 per cent of enterprises using its technology. 61 per cent of enterprises are using Microsoft Hyper-V, while 55.4 per cent use Citrix Xen in some capacity and 12 per cent use other hypervisors, too.
Reliability was cited by end-users as the largest barrier to adoption, with 38.8 per cent saying it was a concern, while 37 per cent cited the need to wait for a hardware refresh before deployment. Performance, backup and restoration were also held up as concerns, but despite this 81.4 per cent of enterprises using virtualisation planned to invest more.
"It is clear that there is still room for increased penetration. We would expect to see consolidation ratios increase over time as organisations look to magnify the ROI they get from virtualisation," said Timashev.
The results of the latest Veeam V-Index survey are hardly surprising – the move to virtualised and cloud environments is high on the agenda for many enterprise IT departments. Indeed, our own survey of UK IT decision makers conducted with Vanson Bourne highlighted that 98% of businesses are planning or implementing a virtualisation strategy.
What is interesting however is the concerns cited around a move to virtualisation, namely that management of such environments is not a higher priority for enterprises. Respondents to our recent survey stated that a reduced capability to work on new initiatives following the introduction of a virtualised environment was a major problem (60%). In addition the integration of disparate systems across the enterprise was also a key issue (47%), mainly down to the increased administration caused by more systems for the IT team to manage.
What is clear is that management of virtualised environments is, and should be, a top priority for businesses moving forward in order to reap the potential benefits. The key to removing these worries is to ensure that thorough planning is part of your overall strategy. Providing a test bed for such environments prior to launch, assessing how an implementation will impact your internal IT teams, and ensuring that the necessary management tools such as intelligent automation are in place, are all things that must be considered before moving to a virtual environments.