Today at VMworld Europe 2009, VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, announced the results of its annual worldwide customer survey that found that business continuity has risen in importance to be the most common reason why its customers deployed the industry-leading VMware platform, surpassing server consolidation, which yields substantial capital and operational cost savings. In addition, more customers are choosing to run their business-critical applications in virtual machines.

“Customers tell us they need to do more with less, and these survey results make it clear that they count on us to make that possible,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president, server business unit, VMware. “Business continuity is a perfect example. High availability and disaster recovery were prohibitively expensive for many organizations when the only solution was a massive hardware investment. With VMware’s ability to pool resources, reduce hardware spend, and automate essential management tasks, business continuity is within reach for many organizations.”

Customers that rely on VMware products often achieve dramatic cost savings by reducing power consumption, hardware procurement, cabling, datacenter floor space, and the manpower required for systems management. VMware’s innovative technology allows customers to realize these benefits while helping to ensure superior application performance.

While business continuity and server consolidation were the top two responses, receiving 45 percent and 40 percent of all responses respectively; customers also cited they are focusing on deploying the VMware platform for improved manageability (30 percent) and the intent to increase the number of virtualized business-critical applications (25 percent).

Customers are increasingly standardizing their datacenters on virtualization technology. More than 42 percent of the survey respondents indicated that they require all new server workloads to be virtualized, as compared with 25 percent a year ago. Moreover, those customers using virtualization technology for their datacenters overwhelmingly turn to VMware for virtualization solutions. More than 84 percent of customers consider VMware to be their “first choice” when deploying new virtualized server workloads.

Virtualization Deployments are Mature; Objectives are Wide-Ranging

The web-based survey of 1,038 VMware customers from North America (US and Canada), Europe (UK, Germany, and France) and Asia-Pacific (Australia, India, China, Japan) also found that the size and the maturity of virtualization deployments is growing. Ninety-two percent of ESX production customers surveyed are running more than 10 virtual machines, while 55 percent are running over 50 virtual machines and 36 percent are running 100 or more virtual machines. In addition, 84 percent of respondents have deployed VMware vCenter Server (formerly known as Virtual Center) in production environments to simplify and automate infrastructure management, and 67 percent are using VMotion to help maintain high availability in their live production environments.

According to the survey, conducted by Management Insights of Southborough, Mass, customers are using the VMware platform for many purposes, and the range of uses is expanding continuously. Virtualization is now a core component of enterprise IT strategies with 98 percent of respondents stating they are satisfied with the industry-leading VMware ESX hypervisor, 94 percent are satisfied with VMware as a company and 61 percent of customers state they have VMware-exclusive virtualization policies.

Customers are virtualizing a wide variety of enterprise Windows and Linux applications, including SAP and Lotus Notes. Among the most commonly virtualized Microsoft applications are Dynamics GP (also known as Great Plains), Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server, and custom-written NET-based applications. Commonly virtualized Oracle solutions include PeopleSoft, custom WebLogic-based applications, and Oracle database systems.

Many Benefits of Desktop Virtualization

While the survey focused on datacenter virtualization, respondents familiar with desktop virtualization were also asked to describe their virtualized desktop environments. The most common reason given for implementing desktop virtualization was remote access, with companies leveraging VMware View to help boost employee productivity and improve data accessibility. The second most common response was centralized desktop deployment, which can reduce management and administration costs, increase application and data security, and enable employees to access rich, personalized desktops from almost any PC or mobile device.

“Corporate IT departments have been wrestling with desktop management for over 20 years, and virtualization gives them a much needed solution,” said Jocelyn Goldfein, vice president and general manager of VMware’s Desktop Business Unit. “The list of IT headaches related to desktops is varied, including patch management, security compliance and challenges of onsite installation and repair. Virtualization addresses these concerns by centralizing desktop management and data storage, and allowing a single administrator to be more efficient while delivering higher service levels to the end users.”

For more details about the survey, please visit www.vmware.com/globalcustomersurvey.