virtualization.info

The first forecast of the year comes from Gartner, which predicted an increase by 43% of virtualization software revenue during this year, moving from $1.9 billion scored in 2008 to $2.7 billion.

In particular the analysis firm expects that revenue from VDI solutions will more than triple from $74.1 million to $298.6 million in 2009 while revenue from server virtualization management software will increase 42% from $913.9 million in 2008 to $1.3 billion in 2009.
Last but not least, the revenue from server virtualization infrastructure will grow 22.5% from $917 million in 2008 to $1.1 billion in 2009.

Gartner is also saying that VDI solutions already represent 11% of the current virtualization software revenue market.

Even more interesting than that, Garner predicts that Microsoft will challenge the VMware leadership by 2013.

This last one sounds like the most pessimist estimate about Microsoft released so far: in 2007 Forrester predicted that the Redmond giant wouldn’t impact the virtualization market until 2010, while IDC, just two months ago, suggested that Microsoft would turn the hypervisor market upside down this year.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Market Trends, Microsoft, VDI, VMware

One week ago virtualization.info published the results of its Virtualization Industry Survey 2008 about the Hardware Virtualization adoption.

Easy to guess, the responses for Q6 - What hardware virtualization platform do you implement? generated concerns among our readers, as Microsoft Hyper-V appeared “more adopted” than VMware ESX.
Some of you demanded a clarification on the methodology used to collect and validate the published data, others simply judged the whole survey as 100% useless.
A few noted that, differently from the usual behavior, there was no comment on the results. It was not a case.

Now that enough buzz was generated it’s time to disclose the real information we collected.

The responses were collected online, through a web form (developed with Google Forms) that accepts anonymous answers (so there is no profiling of the surveyed person) and doesn’t enforce any security measure (so any reader can vote multiple times during a single day or over a longer period of time).
The only tracker that the survey platform registered was a unique timestamp for each response form, reporting date and time (HH:MM:SS).

Some quick tests with Google Forms, that anybody can perform (as the product is free), would confirm that a visitor can complete the survey multiple times per day without being tracked or blocked.

Despite that, virtualization.info tracked every possible information about the people that visited the form page using a 3d party statistic engine.
For each visit we recorded things like the source network, the country, the city, the browser, and other typical information.
Of course this is not enough to unambiguously say how many from a certain source network submitted the survey form. But, depending on how much time a visitor spent on the page (and we tracked this information), we can guess with a good level of confidence if the visitor filled the form or not.

Before going any further, it’s worth to highlight that in an anonymous survey like this one, each vendor is in the same condition and can equally cheat to influence the results.
In an ideal world the vendors (or better, their employees) would recognize that this is a very bad idea, as their actions completely mess up the result and waste the efforts of the ones that prepared the survey and the ones that participated it with honesty.

Said so, the following numbers should be self-explanatory.

Oct. 29, 2008 - The survey is unofficially announced inside an article about the IDC and Gartner market shares reports.

Here’s what happened on the survey form page that day and the other two (Oct. 29-31) of that week:

• 237 page views from Microsoft Corp with 1:49 minutes per visit on average
• 147 page views from Microsoft European Internet Data Centres with 2:37 minutes per visit on average
• 473 responses marked “Hyper-V” as answer to question Q6

versus

• 75 page views from VMware Inc. with 2:30 minutes per visit on average
• 178 responses marked “ESX” as answer to question Q6

Here’s what happened on the survey form page over the entire survey period (Oct. 28 - Dec. 31):

• Microsoft (US and EMEA) page views - 551 with 1:38 minutes per visit on average
• VMware (US and EMEA) page views - 136 with 3:23 minutes per visit on average

Labels: Announcements, Market Trends

Today can finally publish the results of our Virtualization Industry Survey 2008 about hardware virtualization adoption.

The survey was open at the end of October just for our virtualization.info Vanguards members, then extended to all our readers.
In a little more than one month 1050 responses were collected and, as promised, we are publishing today the surprising results:

Q1 - What is the size of your company? 

Q2 - Where your company is located?

Q3 - What is your job title? 

Q4 - Where hardware virtualization is being adopted in your company? (multiple choice)

Q5 - What is the current adoption level of hardware virtualization in your company?

Q6 - What hardware virtualization platform do you implement? (multiple choice)?

Q7 - How many virtual machines do you have deployed at the moment?

Q8 - Which tasks are you employing virtualization for? (multiple choice)

Q9 - What is the biggest challenge in your virtualization projects?

Q10 - Which is the biggest obstacle you found so far in adopting virtualization?

Of course this is just the report of the raw data. The numbers we collected can analyzed in many ways so we’ll publish a second article about this survey trying to extrapolate the most interesting facts, like how many companies use VMware ESX and Hyper-V at the same time, or what kind of challenges are facing the customers managing more than 1000 virtual machines.

Update: Part 2 of this post is now available here.

Labels: Announcements, Market Trends

The evolution of the virtualization industry in the last five years clarified how the market prefers hardware virtualization over any other kind of approach.

Application virtualization certainly is the next big step towards a “liquid” data center, but so far it’s still far away from the mainstream adoption.

The third platform virtualization technique that we track at virtualization.info, something we called for a long time OS partitioning, is the OS virtualization.

As our Virtualization Industry Radar highlights the only commercial players in this segment are Sun and Parallels (formerly SWsoft).
But the Sun presence in this space is very limited: its Solaris Containers (aka Zones) are available only for Solaris 10 and while the product became very flexible in the last two years, it’s clear that the company is moving its investments on hardware virtualization.

This makes Parallels the uncontested leader in this market.
The company, not worried by competition, had the opportunity to grow in the profitable niche of web hosting where hardware virtualization was not the best option.

Why no other vendor ever tried to develop and sell OS virtualization? 
Even Microsoft publicly disclosed its interest for this technology in 2006 but never translated it into a real action.
Whatever the reason is, things may be changing as a new player emerges from the stealth mode: iCore Software.

The company was co-founded in 2007 by by a group of students from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technologies (MIPT), which is ironic considering that SWsoft/Parallels founder, Sergei Beloussov, is Russian as well.
It’s CEO and co-founder is Artem Prokopenko.
No other information about the company is available at the moment.

iCore brings OS virtualization to the clients, selling its containers, called Virtual Accounts, as different user personalities for working, gaming, browsing, etc.
At the moment the company offers its product for free on Windows XP only and claims just 1-2% overhead.

We’ll see if this young company as the numbers to compete against the monopolist Parallels.

iCore Software has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Labels: Market Trends

After the Yankee Group another major analysis firm releases its forecasts for 2009: IDC.
IDC is always brave in its predictions about virtualization, but this year surpassed all expectations.

In its latest report, Worldwide System Infrastructure Software 2009 - Top 10 Predictions, the company says that The Hypervisor Market Will Be Turned Upside Down by Microsoft in 2009:

…Microsoft is working diligently on the version 2 product and will likely address the most critical shortcomings, and with the next release (targeted for 2010) should get the product to the classic Microsoft design point: that being good enough for the vast majority of the market needs.

In the interim, we can still expect that the number of footprints that Hyper-V makes (despite the product’s current maturity level) will be staggering and will turn the volume metrics of the market upside down.

These footprints are likely to penetrate all size class customers. Within the largest customers, many of which have already committed a substantial amount of their infrastructure to VMware solutions, expect use of Hyper-V to be within test, development, and noncritical and lower priority workloads at first…

Please note that IDC talks about a “hypervisor market” implying that a “virtual infrastructure market” exists as well and that may have different protagonists.

This is not the only prediction about virtualization included in the report:

• High Availability of Applications and Data Will Become a Key Driver for the Next Phase of Virtualization Software Adoption
• Standalone Virtual Server Management Tools Will Be Gobbled Up by Automated Systems Change, Configuration, and Operations Automation Platforms
• The Convergence of Software Complexity, Virtualization, and Cloud Computing Will Produce Precipitation in the Form of Software Appliances
• Hypervisors for Client Hardware Will Become Increasingly Available in 2009, Impacting Traditional Desktop Management Concepts

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions has been updated accordingly.

Labels: IDC, Market Trends, Microsoft

Towards the end of the year most analysis firms release their forecasts for the upcoming years.
Unfortunately, most of time the predictions are for the very near term (it’s easy to predict what will happen in Q1 2009) or for the very long term (giving all the time to adjust the communication over time).

This year the Yankee Group takes a hazard and predicts that 2009 will be the year of VDI:

Desktop virtualization will replace PC replacement. Mass workforce consolidations as a result of the economic downturn, especially in the financial services market, will force enterprises to look for ways to provision vast amounts of desktops to absorbed workforces in a fast, cheap and secure manner. These workforce turnover demands—along with improvements in network optimization, VDI protocol efficiency, and the evolution of mobile VDI and offline virtual desktops—mean that 2009 will be the year that enterprises move away from the pilot and evaluation stages and finally take the desktop virtualization plunge. Desktop operating environments will become just another enterprise service, delivered and optimized by the network. This signals a move away from the traditional “fleet maintenance” mentality of desktop/end-user IT support and maintenance, and has the potential to significantly reduce large PC support staffs.

If this is not enough Yankee Group also highlights who will win and who will lose in this segment during 2009:

• Winners: Citrix, Quest/Provision Networks, VMware
• Losers: Dell, HP, McAfee, Microsoft, Symantec

While the list of winners is pretty obvious, the list of losers is puzzling: since when Dell, McAfee and Symantec offer a VDI solution?

The only two that may be really lose in this space are HP and Microsoft. The former because it actually offers a VDI solution that may not compete with the others, the latter because it will not offer a VDI solution until 2010.
But yet: HP is OEM’ing the Provision Networks technology, and Microsoft is partnering with both Citrix and Provision Networks in this space.
If Citrix and Quest/Provision Networks are winner how Microsoft and HP that rely on them can be losers?

Last but not least: what about the other competitors in this space, like Ericom, Pano Logic, VDIworks, Virtual Computer, and all the other well-known players and startups?

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Market Trends, Yankee Group

Yesterday at the Data Center Conference 2008 in Las Vegas, Thomas Bittman, Vice President of Data Center Research at Gartner, announced three remarkable predictions about the virtualization industry:

• By 2012, at least 14% of the infrastructure and operations architecture of Fortune 1000 companies will be managed and delivered much like a cloud-computing provider, internally
• The installed base of VMs will grow more than tenfold between 2007 and 2011
• By 2012, the majority of x86 server workloads will be running in a VM

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Market Trends

Just two weeks ago VMware announced the acquisition of Trango Virtual Processors, a startup focused on the so called embedded virtualization.

VMware announced that the Trango technology will be used to power a new Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) without adding further details.

Now something about the timeline emerges: Reseller News published an article quoting Srinivas Krishnamurti, Director of Product Management and Market Development at VMware, who said:

…Two years ago we looked at the mobile phone market as the next frontier, and we wanted to build a hypervisor on a mobile device. These phones are no longer a communication device, but a computation device …

We don't expect people to go to our website and download it … We're speaking with a number of handset and carriers about proof-of-concept right now…

The products should arrive in around 12 to 18 months…

Labels: Market Trends, VMware

Fifteen days ago virtualization.info launched a web survey to try to understand the state of the union for hardware virtualization.

We invited our readers to answer the survey at the very end of a post about Gartner and IDC, questioning the marketshare numbers that the two recently published.

Despite this very unofficial launch, in just three days we collected over 500 responses, and now we surpassed 750. 
Of course our questionnaire is not comparable with the studies of the tier-1 analysis firms, but it certainly collected one of the biggest number of answers so far in a virtualization survey. And the emerging picture is surprisingly interesting.

We’d like to wait another 15 days or 1000 responses before stopping the survey. After that we’ll publish the results on virtualization.info for free.

If you didn’t participate yet please do: http://www.virtualization.info/surveys

Labels: Announcements, Market Trends

In the last months virtualization.info reported several times that virtualization vendors were moving to attack the mobile and embedded devices market.
We mentioned the Samsung effort to port Xen on ARM processors, the Qumranet plans to distribute KVM as part of any Linux mobile, and even the prediction of the Citrix Vice President of Advanced Products.

Now VMware confirms 100% the trend acquiring one of the very few players in this emerging market: Trango Virtual Processors.

Right now the Trango hypervisor supports an interesting (but very limited) range of real-time OSes, including: Windows CE 5.0 and 6.0, Linux 2.6.x, Symbian 9.x, eCos, µITRON NORTi and µC/OS-II.

Through Trango, VMware plans to release a Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), probably a scaled-down, optimized version of ESX for embedded devices powered by ARM CPUs (like the new Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9).

Of course VMware doesn’t say when the mobile revolution will happen as there’s a couple of complex issues to solve:

• First of all the fact that customers can run a Windows XP virtual machine on their phones doesn’t mean that it’s usable. So the mobile market has to release a device able to satisfy certain requirements (what Citrix calls the Nirvana phone since a long time).
  It’s just our opinion but to interact with a guest OS this device should be something like an Apple iPhone or a Nokia Internet Tablet but much bigger (probably 4 times the iPhone or 2-3 times the Internet Table).
• Secondarily, the vendors producing the real-time OSes (Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Palm and now Google) must accept the fact that their platforms are virtualized and provide support accordingly.
  This is going to be the same slow, painful process already experienced when VMware first introduced its products for server virtualization.

Despite these two issues seem huge to address right now Gartner is optimistic and predicts that by 2012 more than 50% of new smart phones shipped will be virtualized.

If true the virtualization vendors that want to compete with VMware will have to build the necessary know-how very fast, possibly acquiring Trango competitors.
A very interesting one is VirtualLogix which has a solid position and it’s funded by Intel.

The Gartner prediction has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions.

Labels: Acquisitions, Market Trends, Trango, VMware

Microscope is reporting that VMware will cut the product prices by 10% starting next Monday.

As the articles correctly states this move counter the previous 10% price increase that became effective Sep. 1, generating a lot of negative comments.

Microscope couldn’t receive an answer on how VMware can afford this while even its competitors like Citrix are raising up the prices by the same 10%.

Is this a first, concrete effect of the new CEO Paul Maritz guidance?

Update: This cut is effective only in those countries (Europe, Australia and New Zealand) where VMware raised the price Sep. 1, as detailed above. Other countries like Japan don’t benefit of the price cut.

Labels: Market Trends, VMware

Last week a Gartner chart comparing virtualization vendors market shares and their hypervisors’ features generated a lot of buzz as, for example, Oracle VM was reported as more used than Microsoft Hyper-V.

The chart was included in a recent article from Datamation, but Gartner said that it was part of November 2007 report.
The analysis firm has requested the news magazine to update its article with the newest version of that chart, based on projections made on March 2008. Let’s compare the two diagrams:

	November 2007
	March 2008

As you can see the data is remarkably different and even more interesting for several reasons:

• While VMware continues to be unreachable in terms of market share, Microsoft now jumps to the second position, ahead of Citrix, despite Hyper-V is really new on the market while Citrix counted 400 new XenServer customers in Q4 2007, to add on top of the XenSource ones won before the acquisition.
• Oracle, which was as good as Virtual Iron and better than Citrix in the first chart, goes back to the lowest rating for the Management / Automation category and for the Maturity / Stability category.
  It’s an interesting degradation considering that Oracle VM updated its hypervisor to 2.x version in July (after the second projection went out): something terrible must be happened somewhere between 1.x and 1.x.x. to negatively influence Gartner.
• Virtual Iron, XenServer and Hyper-V became more expensive

But the chart is interesting also for another reason: now that we have a guarantee about the freshness of Gartner data, we can compare its market share projections with the IDC ones, published two weeks ago generating another strong flow of comments. The difference is more than remarkable:

• Microsoft market share: IDC (23%) – Gartner (7%)
• VMware market share: IDC (44%) – Gartner (89%)

Please consider that the IDC percent refers to an aggregate data that includes both ESX and Server for VMware and both Hyper-V and Virtual Server for Microsoft. We don’t know if Gartner did the same.

In any case it’s clear that there is a major discrepancy between the projections, putting in serious doubts the reliability of every report on the virtualization market shares.

It would be interesting to have additional numbers from other analysis firms. If Forrester, Burton Group or any other wants to play this game we’ll update this post accordingly.

We wonder, no irony intended, if virtualization.info could be used to provide some reliable metrics about the virtualization adoption to compare with the ones above.
To verify this we published a very simple (9 questions) survey covering just the hardware virtualization (hypervisors) adoption.

This should be considered as a first attempt to measure the market through our audience and it’s expected that the survey design may be unsatisfying for somebody.
If the experiment will be successful we’ll work on more sophisticated questionnaires, evaluating multiple aspects of the market.

Every reader but virtualization vendors employees is welcome to answer the 9 questions. It shouldn’t take more than 3 minutes.
The results of course will be published free of charge online as soon as we reach a fair amount of responses.

http://www.virtualization.info/surveys

Labels: Citrix, Market Trends, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, Virtual Iron

This year Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie starts the PDC 2008 conference by talking about the data center in the cloud.
He introduces a new flavor of Windows called Azure, a version of the Microsoft operating system built for cloud computing (but still based on existing technologies like Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, ASP.Net 3.5, etc.).

Windows Azure will not be available for installation at customers site, but will be deployed at Microsoft data centers (currently available in US, soon worldwide).

Microsoft says that the new OS is powered by a highly scalable hypervisor (doesn’t specify which one but it’s probably Hyper-V 2.0) which acts as a fabric controller and manages both servers and services through roles, channels and interfaces.

All components of this cloud manager are redundant.
Over time Microsoft will unlock new Azure capabilities, like data synchronization, reporting, etc.

It seems that Microsoft plans to call the platform ready for production not earlier than 2010.
Meanwhile a Technology Preview program can be enrolled here.

Labels: Market Trends, Microsoft

Datamation just published a new article about Virtual Iron and its potential to win virtualization competitors.

The piece includes a very interesting Gartner chart that reveals surprising information:

First of all the Microsoft virtualization offering is perceived as the less mature and stable compared with the other in the matrix. Even less than Oracle, the last vendor entering the virtualization space.This shouldn’t surprise much considering that Hyper-V is at its first edition while Oracle uses Xen as the hypervisor for its Oracle VM.
Nonetheless it’s a further confirmation that Microsoft still has a huge amount of work ahead if it wants to change the market perspective.

The second interesting detail is that the estimated number of deployed virtual machines for Microsoft already reaches 50,000, while some competitors like Virtual Iron can just double the number despite they are in the space since a remarkable amount of time.
Once again the fact that Oracle VM has more deployed virtual machines than Microsoft is surprising.

The third interesting fact is that Oracle VM is the only hypervisor perceived as secure as VMware ESX.
As mentioned above Oracle adopts Xen as virtualization engine, pretty much like Citrix and Virtual Iron, but compared with the other is the youngest in the space.

It’s unclear how recent this chart is, but for sure it’s related to 2008: considering that Oracle VM has been around for less than one year, if these numbers are reliable maybe it’s time to reevaluate the relevance of Oracle in the virtualization space.

Labels: Citrix, Market Trends, Microsoft, Oracle, Virtual Iron, VMware

During its Q3 2008 earnings call Citrix unveiled some interesting data about its server and desktop virtualization achievements.

First of all the Q3 revenues for XenServer and XenDesktop are up by $7 million, which gives good hopes to match the goal of $25 million for 2008.

Even more interesting is the actual number of partners that Citrix hired to sell the two products above: 3,300 so far, where the number of resellers quadrupled just for the last quarter. 
It’s worth to note that only 1,200 of those partners are already trained and certified for XenDesktop, so Citrix still has a lot of opportunities to leverage its channel.

Last but not least Citrix reports 200 new customers for XenDesktop (including Tesco, the largest retailer in the UK, and SAP) added during Q3.

Thanks to Seeking Alpha for the call transcript.

Labels: Citrix, Market Trends

Yesterday VMware announced its Q3 2008 earnings, the first report presented by the new CEO Paul Maritz.

During the last quarter the company scored $472 million revenue equal to an increase of 32% from the previous year.
The aggregated revenue of these three quarters of 2008 is 50% more than the same period of 2007.

In details:

• the license revenue is equal to $285 million (15% increase from last year)
• the services revenue is equal to $187 million (70% increase from last year), divided in software maintenance ($147 million with 70% increase) and professional services ($40 million with 69% increase)

The United States are still the largest virtualization adopter ($249 million, equal to 53% of total) but non-US countries are bringing a revenue increase of 42% ($224 million).
During the call VMware specifically mentioned Japan and Korea as the top countries for international opportunity (virtualization.info JP growth seem to confirm this).

Despite the complex economy situation VMware forecasts a revenue growth between 42% and 45% for the last quarter.

During the call Maritz said at least three very interesting things:

• Microsoft couldn’t catch up for another 1-2 years 
• VMware currently has 2,500 people at their R&D department
• VMware sees Asia as a key place where to grow its business in the near term (this may mean a VMworld APAC next year)

Thanks to Seeking Alpha for the entire call transcript.

Labels: Market Trends, VMware

Last week Gartner published a great interview with Ian Pratt, CTO of Xen, Vice President of Advanced Products at Citrix (formerly co-founder of XenSource) and Chairman of Xen.org.

During the interview Pratt answers several questions about cloud computing and next steps for virtualization. Some answers are specially interesting:

Q: How real is the vision of cloud computing for the average organization today? Are we set to see a mass migration of IT functions toward external suppliers?

A: These things never happen as the people who are selling them propose, but I think there will be a movement over time. There are already plenty of startups whose entire IT infrastructure is cloud hosted and so they don't have any physical infrastructures. Clearly, companies such as Amazon are providing a service that is useful.
But it's a far bigger deal to take things that are working and running well in a data center and then try to push them out into the cloud. There are obviously going to be a lot of concerns around security, and you have to do a good job of convincing people that you're going to look after their data in a secure fashion. I think the clouds that we have today are capable of evolving to do that. We have hypervisors. We know how to do a lot of these things, and I think that kind of strong isolation will evolve and be built into these cloud computing farms over time so they can provide those kind of guarantees: You can really create virtual data centers within a cloud and have confidence your data is being looked after, both when it's on disk and flying across the network, as well as when it's actually sitting in memory.

So while VMware believes that the transition to cloud computing will happen in the next two years, Pratt seems more cautions despite his Xen is the only hypervisor used today to power a really large general purpose cloud computing infrastructure: Amazon EC2.

He says it would take probably 10 years:

Q: If I'm a CIO, then should I be looking to move functions out to the cloud now or next year? Or should I sit back and watch?

A: I think we're in the pilot phase. Many CIOs can identify applications that are candidates now, particularly applications that are external network-facing – where the point of the application is to communicate with customers or partners. Those are the kinds of things that probably make sense to move out first, or to look at moving out because the end-user experience will actually be better as a result.
It's a process, just as with virtualization. There were certain applications that people picked first, but you still have databases and things like that running on their networks. I think it will remain like that. At least it's still within your own data center. It's a leap of faith to push this out to the cloud. Although I believe it will happen eventually, it's going to take time. I think we're talking a decade. One of the analogies being used by various folks is power generation. A lot of people had their own generators for a long time and there are still reasons to have your own generator for backup so as not to rely on the grid. Ultimately, it's cheaper, makes more sense and is more reliable to use the grid than to have your own generator in most cases.

Labels: Interviews, Market Trends

Today the analysis firm IDC released some surprising numbers about virtualization vendors market share:

• VMware: 44% (combining ESX and Server)
• Microsoft: 23% (combining Hyper-V and Virtual Server)

Isn’t clear how much of these market shares translates in production deployments and how much is about test & development or shelfware, but one thing is for sure: the Microsoft gain is remarkable (and its growing case studies library confirms it) even if VMware still leads with 78% revenue share.

Besides the numbers above there is something else that is interesting: worldwide virtualization license shipments in the second quarter of 2008 (2Q08) increased 53% year over year, compared to a 72% year-over-year increase the previous quarter.

Who ships more servers for virtualization duties? HP (34% market share) followed by Dell (25%) and IBM (16%).

Update: Easy to guess the report above generated a huge number of reactions (and complains from VMware).

Specifically IDC is questioned on several obscure points:

• In its previous report about virtualization market shares, about Q1 2008, IDC assigned 20% to Microsoft.
  Hyper-V was formally released on June 26, 2008, which is two days before the end of Q2. So it seems unlikely that Hyper-V could get 3% in just two business days.
  As some virtualization.info pointed in the comments it’s very likely that IDC included in this count also beta and RC deployments. If so the numbers couldn’t reflect the real state of the market because VMware tents to keep ESX betas private (like for the upcoming ESX 4.0).
• Unlike the past, this time IDC didn’t compare its findings with VMware and refused to break out the reported numbers for each product.
• There’s an incongruence between the VMware estimated year over year growth (52%) and the real one reported by VMware to the SEC (39%) for the Q2 2008.

For all these reasons we expect an official statement from IDC clarifying the methodology that provided the market shares.

Meanwhile it’s worthwhile to answer a question that Mike DiPetrillo raised in the comments: why a 23% market share for Microsoft should be considered remarkable? The answer we can give:

• Because it didn’t go lower despite ESX 3.5 Update 2 introduced a huge advantage in terms of features and most VMware efforts in marketing is focused on highlighting such difference
• Because one would assume (maybe incorrectly) that customers started to dismiss Virtual Server in the last few months. In such case Hyper-V may have some more than 3% market share.

Labels: Dell, HP, IBM, Market Trends, Microsoft, VMware

Not surprisingly at all the analysis firm Gartner just released a new report forecasting that virtualization will be the top strategic technology for 2009. But more interesting than that is the firm prediction on VDI adoption:

…However, despite ambitious deployment plans from many organizations, deployments of hosted virtual desktop capabilities will be adopted by fewer than 40 percent of target users by 2010.

The second most strategic technology for 2009, believe or not, is cloud computing.
We’ll see if Gartner prediction is more accurate than virtualization architects perceptions collected so far at virtualization.info.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Market Trends, VDI

Since few weeks the members of the virtualization.info Vanguards community are enjoying a new discussion forum.
As the feature is pretty new not all of our 1,800 members are using it. Nonetheless some interesting threads are coming out.

One of the is specially interesting and starts this way: Do you think the current financial crisis will push CEO/CFO/CIO to reduce the IT costs by adopting Cloud Computing services? (Amazon EC2, Salesforce, etc.)

The answers arrived so far from prominent virtualization architects and engineers bring in several perspectives, all worthwhile of mention. A summary:

• …I think you will start to see more and more companies using the cloud for DR purposes as well to where the CapEx is reduced dramatically and the monthly OpEx is reduced as well where companies will spend approx. $60 per VM per month…
• …I don't see the recent financial turmoil leading to an increased adoption rate for cloud computing services. In this market I think executives are focused on saving money and cutting costs, but an en masse migration to a cloud service provider from a current standing data center is not a cheap solution. The solution requires capital up front, manhours to put together a contract, train internal resources, architect a solution few are familiar with and properly vet the solution. Some may dabble with it as a development alternative but considering a large contingent of data centers have at least some core services running in a Windows environment, and Windows-based cloud-hosted virtual machines are just now becoming available, I think we're years away from seeing this really take off…
• …I don't think companies would look at the cost savings yet so much as the reliability. I don't think Amazon et al. have proven themselves with a long enough or good enough track record that companies would turn over their core systems to them…
• …I really see cloud computing as an updated and automated way of outsourcing. In my experience outsourcing does usually have a small increase in activity during poor economic climates, outsourcing is more about shifting responsibility and allowing the CEO/CIO/COO to shift capital costs around and also pretend to have more certainty within their IT operations. Unfortunately, its also a lot about blame assignment for when a service failure occurs. Its easy for the CXO to blame the outsourcer and say its not their fault…

As you can see the discussion is very interesting but it’s clear enough that cloud computing is not here (as a mainstream technology). Virtualization is, so the original question may become: Can the financial crisis drive companies to virtualization?

Labels: Market Trends

Immediately after the last VMware VMworld conference something very strange happened: as a single, concerted effort worldwide online magazines started writing articles about the complexity behind virtualization, about its lack of tools, about the real costs of technology adoption.

Nothing wrong with it but still surprising: so far the press coverage has always been enthusiastic, giving so much space to any company using (and abusing) the term virtualization.
Now, altogether, every journalist raises concerns and offers warning. Few examples:

• The Dark Side of Data Center Virtualization
• Virtualisation ahead of predictions, but failing to reach potential
• The heartburn and happiness of virtualization
• Virtualization - Hot Tech or Hot Air
• Virtualization: silicon and software salvation or technological tower of Babel?
• Mix-and-Match Trouble with Virtualization, Cloud Computing
• Lowdown on virtualization hype
• Virtualization — Problem Solver and Problem

What happened? Over 14,000 delegates reaching Las Vegas for VMworld 2008 should have demonstrated that there is a real interest for virtualization and that, financial crisis or not, companies are committed to invest on it.

Despite that, a winding pessimism seems the main theme of the last two weeks’ articles. 
It’s unlikely that everybody, at the same time, realized that virtualization introduces new challenges, so what’s real reason behind this new wave of prudence?

Labels: Market Trends

As usual at virtualization.info the last post of the year reviews how virtualization grew, which trends emerged and where the industry seems to go through the numbers achieved in the last 12 months.

First of all the look for virtualization contents continues to increase, with a healthy 50% growth from previous year:

Excluding a couple of new entries (which replaced Switzerland and Japan), top countries showing interest in virtualization didn't change since 2006:

1. US
2. UK
3. Germany
4. Canada
5. Netherlands
6. Italy
7. France
8. Australia
9. Spain [NEW]
10. Sweden [NEW]

Most visited posts during 2007 reveal new interests among readers:

1. How to create a new virtual machine with VMware Player (and related: Guide to create .vmx files for VMware Player, How to launch ISO and use LiveCDs inside VMware Player, Create VMware VMX configuration files easily, VMX Builder for VMware Player)
2. How to install Sun Solaris 10 inside VMware Workstation 5.5
3. virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap
4. virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar [NEW]
5. VMware ESX Server 3.1.0 / VirtualCenter 2.1.0 features list - Updated with full details (and related: VMware Infrastructure 3.1 renamed 3.5, hits beta 2 - Updated with full details, VMware Infrastructure 3.5 and ESX Server 3i to be available since December 2007 with new prices and editions) [NEW]
6. Microsoft publishes a license calculator for virtualization scenarios [NEW]
7. How to improve disk I/O performances with VMware Workstation
8. virtualization.info Rent-A-Lab [NEW]
9. Choosing between VMware Server and ESX Server [NEW]
10. virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Predictions [NEW]

How many forecasts from famous analyst firms really happened in 2007?

This year several things were expected:

• 9 of 10 enterprises will have virtualization by 2007 (August 2007 prediction by Yankee Group)
  Probably false: VMware, which is the most prominent virtualization vendor at the end of 2007, reports only 20,000 enterprise customers worldwide, not even 100% of Fortune 500.
• Automation to play a strong role in managing virtualization resources by next 18 months (January 2007 prediction by IDC)
  To be false: automation didn't play any significant role in the 2007 and it's unlikely the situation will suddenly change in the first half of 2008.
• Virtualization 2.0 (continuity, DR, HA) to emerge in 2007 (December 2006 prediction by IDC)
  False: disaster recovery still is one of the most empty segments in the virtualization market. Several innovative solutions (from VMware, PlateSpin, Vizioncore and others) are in the work but they will not get any traction until next year.
• Brazil to widely adopt virtualization in 2007 (August 2006 prediction by Gartner)
  False: Brazil didn't appear as a key virtualization adopter on any stat during 2007. Google Trends doesn't report the country among top 10 searcher for virtualization or other relevant keywords, and the search volume in 2007 didn't grow much compared with 2005 and 2006.
  virtualization.info confirms such trend reporting the country at 16th position among most active sources of visits.
• VMware to maintain 55% market share over next 12-15 months (July 2006 prediction by Yankee Group)
  True: VMware is reported to maintain a market share of around 70% in 2007.

What to expect for next year instead?

• Virtualization 2.0 will come in 2008 (October 2007 prediction by Gartner)
• A mainstream hypervisor will suffer serious vulnerability before the end of 2008 (September 2007 prediction by Gartner)
• New licensing models around virtualization to be launched by the end of 2008 (October 2006 prediction by Forrester)
• Server virtualization will take mainframe-like workload consolidation through 2008 (December 2003 prediction by Gartner)

Labels: Market Trends