Study: 1/3 of enterprises plan to switch primary hypervisor within 12 months

The vast majority of enterprises are using a mixture of hypervisors and more than one third of those companies plan to switch their primary virtualization engine in the next year.

And despite the itch to consolidate, the vast majority of enterprises don't really have a good handle on the scope of virtualization going on in their respective companies. Does that sound right to you?

According to a quarterly study dubbed the V-index conducted by UK market researcher Vanson Bourne (and commissioned by one vendor), roughly 38 percent of 500 enterprises interviewed across the U.S. and Europe intend to change their primary server hypervisor in the next 12 months and the same is true for 34 percent of the same population doing desktop virtualization.

The consolidation trend is reportedly being driven by rising costs, complex licensing models and maturing features of virtualization platforms. The V-index study, commissioned by VMware premier partner Veeam, has 84 percent of enterprises using VMware, 43 percent using Microsoft Hyper-V, 53 percent using Citrix Xen and 16 percent using other hypervisors, with the quarter to quarter increase share going to VMware.

That's not surprising (given the source of the study), but more seriously because of VMware's known dominance and leadership in the market. Veeam is a top VMware Technology Alliance partner with offices in the U.K. and Columbus, Ohio in the U.S. and provides VMware backup and VMware management software.

And I suppose it's not surprising that CIOs, according to the same study, "overestimate" the number of virtual machines by 80 percent. Most CIOs, after all, want to believe that they are getting all the power they can get out of their servers -- and that they are hip to the cloud thing.  For instance, the "perceived" ratio of VMs to physical servers is 9:1, the V-index found.  But the reality is that the ratio is more like five virtual machines per each server, the V-Index maintains.

But the information itself is interesting, and useful to ponder. The V-index, which got its start last July, offers interesting measurements of virtualization.  I would be very interested in getting enterprise  feedback on its findings and the extent to which consolidation -- and the extent of actual virtualization --is going on in corporations across the globe. 

Below, I've pulled verbatim a list of initial finding of the v-index when launched in July. Please feel free to comment, question, take issue with or agree with some of the key findings of the third quarter v-index released today or any of these basic findings arrived at last summer:

39.4% of all servers within all of the enterprises surveyed were virtual.