Customer survey shows growing virtualization maturity

While at VMworld Europe 2009, VMware released the results of its annual worldwide customer survey conducted by Management Insights of Southborough, Mass. The Web-based survey included 1,038 VMware customers from North America (U.S. and Canada), Europe (U.K., Germany, and France) and Asia-Pacific (Australia, India, China, Japan).

And even though I don’t usually throw my full faith behind company surveys, I always enjoy reading them for what they are and what they offer. After all, it isn’t every day that you get to ask and listen to what over 1,000 virtualization administrators or customers think about the technology and how they use it.

So what did the survey turn up?

Interestingly, it showed that business continuity has risen in importance and become the most common reason for customers to deploy virtualization, passing up the original use case of server consolidation for the datacenter. This is also a testament of maturity. People are moving beyond just the cost savings aspect of virtualization and consolidation and thinking more along the lines of “what can it do for me now?”

“Customers tell us they need to do more with less, and these survey results make it clear that they count on us to make that possible,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of the server business unit at VMware. “Business continuity is a perfect example. High availability and disaster recovery were prohibitively expensive for many organizations when the only solution was a massive hardware investment.”

The survey also found that the size and the maturity of virtualization deployments are growing. Ninety-two percent of ESX production customers surveyed are running more than 10 virtual machines, while 55 percent are running over 50 virtual machines and 36 percent are running 100 or more virtual machines. And in addition to growing and scaling out their implementations, they are also entrusting virtualization to run their mission-critical applications.

Years ago, virtualization made its way on selective servers on a case-by-case basis. People started off slowly, implementing the technology at the lowest common denominator. Now, according to the survey results, customers are increasingly standardizing their datacenters on virtualization technology. More than 42 percent of the survey respondents indicated that they require all new server workloads to be virtualized, as compared with only 25 percent just a year ago.

Proof positive we’ve come a long way in the virtualization community in a very short time.

You can check out the VMware customer survey results for yourself to find out even more information.