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:
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.
Tags: Cisco, Citrix, EMC, Hyper-V, Microsoft, server virtualization, VMware Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
According to ESG Research, only 7% of the large mid-market (i.e., 500-1000 employees) and enterprise (i.e., 1,000 employees or more) are not using server virtualization technology and have no plans to do so. Alternatively, 61% are using server virtualization technology extensively in test/development AND production environments.
Okay, so server virtualization technology is everywhere, but how are large organizations using it? Many technology vendors would have you believe that enterprises are using server virtualization as the on-ramp to cloud computing. The industry crows about server virtualization’s use for IT automation and self-service, as VMs are rapidly provisioned, dynamically re-configured, and moved constantly from physical server to physical server for load balancing and resource optimization.
It’s a great vision, it just isn’t happening today. Most organizations use server virtualization for web applications and file and print services but far fewer have taken on transaction-oriented applications or databases. Many firms still struggle with performance issues when trying to align physical networks, storage devices, and servers with virtualization technology. As for VM mobility (i.e., vMotion), only 30% of the organizations surveyed by ESG use VM mobility on a regular basis. Why eschew VM mobility? It turns out that 24% of organizations say they have no need to use VM mobility functionality at this time.
The ESG data does suggest that server virtualization represents paradigm shift driving huge changes in IT organizations, processes, and technologies, but these transitions will take time to work their way out. Many enterprises will get to a state of more dyanamic data center transformation–around 2013 or so.
Take my word for it, the IT rhetoric around server virtualization is visionary hype rather than actual reality. I’ve got tons of data to back this up. There are more average Joe IT shops out there than whiz-bang organizations like , , and Microsoft and there always will be.
Tags: Amazon, Cloud Computing, ESG, ESG Research, Google, Microsoft, server virtualization, vMotion, VMware Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
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