Veeam finds 40 per cent of all servers are now virtual

Nearly 40 per cent of all servers are now virtual machines, while over 90 per cent of enterprises now use virtualisation to some degree, according to the first results of a project by virtualisation management firm Veeam to track the spread of the technology.

The V-index is aiming to monitor the penetration rate of virtualisation among large-scale enterprises, with findings available freely on the web at www.V-index.com.

"The V-index is intended to provide a simple, measurable, consistent view of the impact of the technology, and grant an understanding of virtualisation's progress towards becoming the de facto IT platform and the obstacles in its way," explained Veeam chief executive Ratmir Timashev.

Veeam intends to update its results quarterly, but the initial findings already show that 91.9 per cent of large enterprises surveyed are using virtualisation, and that 39.4 per cent of all servers are now virtual.

These results came from a Q2 2011 survey taking in 544 companies across the US, the UK, France and Germany.

Not surprisingly, 84 per cent of those surveyed were running VMware tools, while 61 per cent were using Microsoft's Hyper-V, and 55.4 per cent Citrix's Xen.

However, a different picture emerges when Veeam looked at the systems that customers have settled on as their primary platform for virtualisation.

VMware was the main virtualisation platform in use by 58 per cent of respondents, while Citrix accounts for an impressive 20.2 per cent and Microsoft's Hyper-V 18.6 per cent.

The survey also found that the typical consolidation ratio was lower than expected, at an average 6.3 virtual machines running on each physical host server.

Among the perceived barriers to greater take-up, five major issues were cited by about a third of the respondents.

These included concerns about reliability, the need for a hardware refresh, application performance issues, backup and restoration concerns, and difficulties in managing the virtual infrastructure.

Despite these issues, over 80 per cent of those firms already using virtualisation indicated that they planned to increase their level of server virtualisation over the next year.

Veeam said that it may extend its survey in future to cover virtual desktop infrastructure as well as virtual servers.