Analyzing the Results of the Centrify Survey on the Virtualization Market

Thursday, September 17, 2009

During VMworld the other week we announced the results of a 500 person survey on the virtualization market and the current state of securing virtualized environments. A summary presentation of the results can be found here. The survey has already garnered a bunch of press, including this analysis by Thomas Prickett Morgan of The Register, an article by Amy Morgan of ServerWatch, a ZDNet blog post by Jason Perlow and this eWeek article by Jeffrey Burt. In this blog post I want to drill down into the results of the survey as it relates the current state of the virtualization market, and in my next post I will analyze the results as it relates to customers thoughts re: virtualization security.

[Thanks to our great marketing team for helping me with this blog post, including Tom Cromelin and Frank Cabri.]

First, a word on the survey methodology: between August 12 and August 21, 2009, the survey "Virtual Data Centers - Market Dynamics and Security" was conducted under the auspices of an independent research firm. Over 30,000 IT professionals, representing a broad range of industries were invited to participate. 531 respondents answered one or more survey questions and 480 completed the survey. At no time during the survey was Centrify identified as the sponsor of the research. The results reported in this document are derived from the 480 respondents who completed the survey.

The key findings vis a vis the state of the virtualization market were the following:

• People are moving aggressively to virtualize their servers. As of today, approximately 26% have more than half of their servers virtualized. By the end of 2010 that number will double so that more than 50% will have at least half of their servers virtualized.
• There is great diversity in Hypervisors and hosts and in the OSes that are running on them. 26% of the people who have virtualized their servers are doing it without using VMware. Of the remaining 74% of those using virtualization and are using VMware, more than 57% are using other Hypervisors in addition to VMware.

To me this means that server virtualization platforms are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, but also increasingly heterogeneous as organizations deploy bare-metal hypervisors from vendors such as VMware and Citrix while, in parallel, they leverage virtualization technology built into the latest UNIX, Linux and Windows operating systems. In other words, The Register's headline of "No, VMware doesn't own server virtualization" is an apt description.

OK, so now lets drill into the survey results in detail as it relates to the state of the virtualization market. Here were the initial questions and the responses we got.

1. Which of the following SERVER operating systems does your organization use?

Observations: The dominance of Windows is pretty significant, and interesting how Red Hat is clear #2 but Solaris is hanging tough. Though only 8% had no Windows servers at all, about 21% of the responding companies were Windows-only.

2. Approximately what percent of your CURRENT server population is running a single instance OS on a physical machine rather than multiple virtual servers?

               More standalone servers     <          >     More virtual servers

Observations: The chart shows the dominance of single OS servers installed today. Moving from the left, where 14.2% of the organizations report that ALL of their servers are single OS to the far right where only 6 of the respondents claim to be 100% virtualized, we can note that only about 26% are more than half virtualized (the sum of the rightmost six columns.) Compare this to the answers to question 5. "What is the estimated percentage of servers that will be virtualized by the end of 2009 and 2010?"

3. Which of the following hosts and hypervisors are in use in your environment?

Observations: While VMware ESX, with 60.8%, has the largest penetration in organizations, only 32% claimed they use VMware exclusively. After VMware, Microsoft has the next largest penetration (25%) distributed across all sizes of environments. The folks in Redmond must be pleased with this given they are a recent entrant into the market.

4. What is the average number of guest operating systems per virtual host/hypervisor? (Please estimate if necessary.)

Observation: Of the ~92% of organizations that are using some virtualization, half are using it aggressively, with hypervisors hosting 7 or more servers.

5. What is the estimated percentage of servers that will be virtualized by the end of 2009 and 2010?

Observations: As noted, nearly 26% of the respondents today have virtualized at least half of their systems (see question 2). In less than 18 months, that number will double, so that by the end of 2010, 51% expect to have the majority of their systems virtualized (the sum of the rightmost four red columns).

In my next blog post I will take a lot at the results of the survey as it relates to securing a virtualized world.

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The team [in Microsoft's Linux and open source lab] spent a lot of time improving how Linux systems can talk to Microsoft's Active Directory and finally settled on a third-party application called Centrify. "Getting authentication to work correctly with Active Directory is not simple," admitted Hilf [lab director]. "It's often fragile and to do it in a broad way is a non-trivial technical task."

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August 11, 2005