My colleague Mark Bowker and I are at a Virtualization, Cloud Computing, and Green IT conference in Washington DC this week. In one of the panels we hosted, an IT executive from a cabinet-level agency mentioned that the agency was qualifying Microsoft Hyper-V even though it already has an enterprise license in place with VMware. When asked why the agency was doing this, he responded, “we are a Windows shop and have a great relationship with Microsoft. VMware has been great but we simply believe that the world is moving to heterogeneous virtualization platforms and we want to be ready for this.”

This IT executive is not alone. In a recent ESG Research study, 55% of the organizations’ surveyed say that their primary virtualization solution is VMware (VMware Server, ESx, ESxi, etc.). This relationship with VMware doesn’t preclude them from using other hypervisors however. In fact, 34% of survey respondents are using 2 virtualization solutions and 36% are using three or more. This was a survey of 463 North American-based IT professionals working at organizations with more than 500 employees.

My take-aways are as follows:

1. Users should plan for multiple virtualization platforms. Standardization is great but it is likely that some applications and workloads will work best on one hypervisor versus another. This will demand training and management of disparate environments so standard processes and tools will be crucial.
2. Training is key. Vendors need to realize that users need help with training and skills development before they buy the next virtualization widget.
3. Vendors should develop broad partnering strategies. Two years ago, dedicating all virtualization resources to VMware was probably a good bet but this is no longer the case. Need proof? Cisco recently struck up a relationship with Citrix even though it has lots of resources invested in VMware and its 3 amigos relationship that also includes .

Yeah, I know, everyone would like one standard IT solution to meet all their needs. It hasn’t happened in the past and it won’t happen with virtualization either. The sooner that IT professionals and the industry recognize this the better.