Hyper-V Prefered Virtualization Solution Shows Survey

According to a “Virtualization Industry Survey“, a research work conducted and published by Virtualization.info among 1,050 respondents Hyper-V, the relatively new virtualization technology by Microsoft.

Question 6 of the survey is “What hardware virtualization platform do you implement?“. It is a closed question which offers respondents multiple choices to as answers. Among the options are 8 hypervisor choices – VMware ESX, Hyper-V, Xen Server, Virtual Iron, SuSe, RHEL, Oracle VM, KVM, as well an answer “None”.

Hyper-V receives 600 responses with 475 for EXS and XenServer with almost 100. The results from the survey might be questioned and disputed and one of the arguments is that they haven’t been held with precise statistical and sociological  methods. But at the same time surveys results show something, that analysts of the virtualization industry use to say within the last 6 months. Most of them are positive that Microsoft will dramatically increase its influence in virtualization industry as well as its share in the VPS hosting market.

VMware’s ESX virtualization platform has been used from businesses for for years. At the same time Hyper-V is on the market for less than 12 months. The main reason small businesses to decide to try Hyper-V or to switch to Microsoft’s solution is that it is offered as free applications as a part of Windows 2008 Server.

Keith Ward from Virtualization Review has featured an article about the survey published in Virtualization.info. He has asked important questions about the poll – “Are the respondents using Hyper-V or did they respond in the affirmative because they’ve installed Windows 2008 on their networks and Hyper-V is part of the package, even if they’re not using it?”.

There are 10 questions in the article, in which Virtualization.info presents the survey. An interesting question is # 8 – “Which tasks are you employing virtualization for?”. It is again closed a multi-choice question that offers respondents to choose among a number of answers.

Most of them said that they employed virtualization technology to consolidate their servers. The second groups of respondents said that they decided to use virtualization technologies for testing purposes. Third group uses virtualization for software development purposes, and the fourth one for disaster recovery. The answer “Virtual Desktops Hosting” is ranked 6th.

The Part 1 of the survey can be found here – http://www.virtualization.info/2009/01/virtualization-industry-survey-2008.html.