Virtualisation technology is ready to support mission-critical applications, according to a recent survey conducted by managed hosting provider Rackspace.

The research revealed that 57 per cent of respondents are already using virtualisation for internal applications.

Some 72 per cent indicated that they were 'comfortable' hosting mission-critical applications in a production environment on a virtualised platform.

A total of 71 per cent of respondents said that they would host their applications on a virtualised infrastructure with a hosting provider. However, the majority of customers are currently not comfortable using a shared virtual environment.

Only around 13 per cent of respondents are willing to share a physical server with other hosting customers, a practice common in hosting. Top concerns cited were performance and security vulnerabilities in shared environments.

"Virtualisation is making significant traction in the market, but it is still a maturing technology," said Nicolas Keller, director of platform products at Rackspace.

"The first phase of virtualisation has focused on cost savings from server consolidation, but the next phase will be about infrastructure management to improve flexibility and scalability."

Rackspace is beta testing a virtualisation offering to address the management of large-scale implementations, and will address the needs and concerns that have been revealed through this customer survey.

"We have been researching virtualisation for a while now and wanted to make sure that our customers are ready, that the market is ready and most importantly that our offering is fanatical support-ready," added Keller.

Additionally, the Rackspace survey revealed that 42 per cent of the 3,000 respondents believe that virtualisation will have a fundamental impact on IT.

Although 43 per cent had no preference between open source or proprietary virtualisation products, the majority of respondents use VMware.