Just when you thought you had a handle on the virtualization market, someone creates yet another survey that shakes things up a bit. These latest findings not only shine a light on some interesting new numbers; they also raise new questions worth asking.

The survey comes from Veeam Software, a third-party virtualization backup, disaster recovery, and management solution provider that has made quite a name for itself in the virtualization ecosystem. This is its second quarterly survey, and the ongoing series has been dubbed the V-Index report. The V-Index was commissioned by Veeam, who in fairness has been a longtime VMware partner. However, the company recently expanded its development efforts to include other hypervisor technologies, and the survey was conducted by U.K. market researcher Vanson Bourne, not the Veeam team.

According to the company, V-Index tracks the penetration of virtualization across the server estates of at least 500 large-scale enterprises across the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Vanson Bourne surveyed 578 enterprises (34 more than were surveyed in the previous quarter), and the survey was conducted with fairly large companies in mind -- those with over 1,000 employees -- and wasn't limited to Veeam's customer base.

In the September V-Index, 86.5 percent of the 578 organizations that responded to the survey said they had some type of server virtualization in their data centers. Across each of these enterprises, the V-Index report found an average penetration rate of 38.9 percent, meaning that was the percentage of servers being virtualized. The survey also found 81 percent of enterprises using virtualization expect to see their virtualized server estate increase in the next 12 months.

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Read the entire InfoWorld Virtualization Report article.