The results from Wikibon’s Multi-Hypervisor study are back, and there’s a good amount of data that you can dig into.
For virtualization trends the survey provides evidence that virtualization will continue to grow (percentage of virtualized servers is predicted to grow from 69% today to 84% in two years time). Also the survey indicates that many companies experiment with multi-hypervisor strategies, but 55% predict to move to a single hypervisor in 18 months.
The three big takeaways for me include:
1. VMware is still the dominant hypervisor with growth leveling off.
- VMware was perceived to be dominant in functionality and all workload types were being run in production under VMware.
- There is continued movement towards VMware (of the installations with a single hypervisor in 18 months time, two-thirds would be VMware).
2. Hyper-V is becoming good enough for many use cases and growing fast.
- Like many enterprise Microsoft products, the 3rd release is the game changer. Hyper-V V3 (Windows 2012) is really gaining momentum in the small-mid section of the market.
- Planned adoption was measured in the survey results – Of the installations with a single hypervisor in 18 months time, one-third would be Hyper-V.
- But the features need to be there – ODX support an essential requirement for storage arrays for Microsoft environments (VNX was first to market here by the way)
3. EMC VNX continues to lead in virtualization integration.
- EMC VNX had the most VMware integration of all the storage arrays analyzed and led in the overall group, the block-only group, and the file-only group.
- EMC had a clean sweep of the block-only group, with the VNX, VMAX 10K and VMAX 20-40K in first, second, and third place.
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But like I said, there’s a lot to dig into if you like data and colorful charts including:
- A storage array/VMware integration feature matrix showing each vendor and the VMware integration they provide (thumbnail above)
- A VMware Storage Integration Assessment by Vendor Array (leads to a score).
- Advice for peers regarding hypervisor strategy – good advice in here.
Check out the full results on the Wikibon blog post here.
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