vSphere 5 Users Proliferating Like Crazy

The Virtual Geek is an EMC blog written by a funny guy who is coincidentally known as the Virtual Geek.

His Official Unofficial VMware Storage Survey Results came out last week, and there are, as they say, some interesting data points here that dovetail with my "vSphere 5: Slow to Roll? blog, which also posted last week. In it, I asked the question, "Could it be that we are underestimating the rigors of implementing vSphere 5?"

Virtual Geek answered that question in an indirect fashion when he revealed that 59.2 percent of the 1,935 respondents said they were already using vSphere 5. That's a lot of users who are implementing vSphere 5 post haste, since it only GA'ed in late August. Working backwards, 85 percent of respondents identified themselves as vSphere 4.1 users, followed by 24.3 percent saying they were vSphere 4.0 users, 12 percent saying they were on V13.5, and 1.4 percent reporting they were pre-V13.5 users.

Methodology nugget: The number of virtual machines at respondent sites ranged from four to 200,000.

Methodology non-nugget: Virtual Geek did not describe respondents in a meaningful fashion, other than saying they came from 65 unique countries, and 941 unique cities.

In response to the question, "Do you use any other Virtualization Technologies?", 48.8 percent cited the rapidly up-and-coming Hyper-V, followed by 26.5 percent noting XenServer, which, it would seem, is benefiting handsomely from its close relationship with VDI meister XenDesktop.

Virtual Geek's survey also revealed that a lot of the low-hanging virtualization fruit has indeed been picked. To wit, when asked what percentage of their x86 environments were virtualized, 11.3 percent said 100 percent, 32.2 percent said 90 percent, 80 percent replied 23.7 percent, 60 percent noted 18.3 percent, 40 percent said 8.3 percent, 20 percent said 4.2 percent, and 10 percent reported that two percent of their x86 environments were virtualized.

With a nod toward Virtual Geek, I point out that EMC topped the list of replies when respondents were asked to check off their favorite vendor of choice in virtualized server environments. EMC basically lapped the field with 41.1 percent of the vote, followed by the usual storage suspects, NetApp, HP, Dell, IBM and Hitachi -- none of whom received even half the responses chocked up by EMC. It's good to be King.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 12/20/2011 at 12:48 PM