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Virtualisation is not just "tinkering at the edges" but supporting day-to-day business processes, a leading analyst has claimed.

At a VMware event in London IDC analyst Chris Ingles said that virtualisation is increasingly being used for core business processes.

Citing an IDC global survey, he said that while just seven per cent of installed enterprise servers are virtualised, 69 per cent of those purchased in the last year will be virtualised.

And over half of those systems are supporting core business processes, rather than being used solely for backup or secondary systems, he said. "It's not just tinkering at the edges," Ingles said.

Ingles said he expects the number of physical servers which are virtualised to jump from seven per cent this year to 50 per cent in 2011. "That may be a little bit conservative," he said.

The growth will follow a trend of firms buying fewer but larger - and more expensive - servers. Despite unit growth falling, money spent on servers is growing, he said.

"It's quite clear that people with high investment in systems will want to find ways to take advantage of them," Ingles said.

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