Red Hat Survey Shows Demand for Virtualization is Not Waning

Is virtualization still as strategically important to organizations as it was just a few years ago? According to a Red Hat survey of 900 enterprise IT administrators, systems architects and IT managers across geographic regions and industries, the answer is yes. Hybrid cloud computing and Linux containers are hot, but virtualization adoption remains on the rise, especially within the enterprise, according to the survey.

Find more details here.

Red Hat's survey showed that most respondents are using virtualization to drive server consolidation, increase provisioning time, and provide infrastructure for developers to build and deploy applications. Cost pressures clearly remain top of mind, with cost or cost reduction ranking as greatest challenge, an expected benefit and main reason to migrate.

According to a Red hat post:

"Over the next two years, respondents indicated that they expect to increase both virtualized infrastructure and workloads by 18 percent and 20 percent, respectively. In terms of application mix, the most commonly virtualized workloads among respondents were web applications, including websites (73 percent), web application servers (70 percent) and databases (67 percent). Virtualization usage starts early in an application’s lifecycle as well, with 85 percent of respondents indicating that they develop on virtual machines, with another 61 percent saying they also deploy these applications on virtualized infrastructure. Virtualization’s benefits are generally known throughout the IT world, from reduced overhead costs to a smaller datacenter footprint."

 Not surprisingly, IT leaders do not expect virtualization to spring surprises on their operations, instead serving as reliable and highly-available technology. When asked about the most important capabilities of virtualization, the top answers were reliability (79 percent), high availability (73 percent), and performance (70 percent); followed closely by security and scalability.

All the way back in 2011, I wrote a post on how organizations would increasingly leverage virtualization to run multiple operating systems and environments concurrently.  The post noted: "Individuals and organizations are already running heterogenous computing environments where multiple operating systems work alongside each other through virtualization. This allows access to a much wider universe of applications, and applications are, in the end, what make a difference for users. Any commercial operating system provider who ignores the trend toward virtualization is playing with fire."

Indeed, while open source virtualization choices have shifted the market away from some huge proprietary players, there is still much demand for virtualization. Get more details from Red Hat's survey here.