Veeam Software, innovative provider of VMware data protection, disaster recovery and VMware management solutions for virtual datacenter environments, has launched the V-index. Hosted on www.V-index.com, a site which Veeam plans to develop into a community portal, the V-index is a free resource which tracks the penetration rate of virtualization across the server estates of large-scale enterprises. Its aim is to take an ongoing snapshot of virtualization’s penetration within the enterprise, consolidation ratios, use of different hypervisors and possible barriers to further adoption.

“As the significant cost, power and efficiency benefits of virtualization accelerate its position within the enterprise, so the potential of all IT infrastructures to be based on virtual estates increases,” said Ratmir Timashev, President and CEO of Veeam. “The V-index is intended to provide a simple, measurable, consistent view of the impact of the technology and grant an understanding both of virtualization’s progress towards becoming the de facto IT platform and the obstacles in its way.”

For its initial, Q2 2011 findings the V-index reported the following:

• The current V-index Penetration Rate is 39.4%. This means that 39.4% of all servers within all of the enterprises surveyed were virtual.
• The average number of physical servers in an enterprise is 664.
• 91.9% of all enterprises are using virtualization to some degree.
• Of these enterprises, each has on average 470 virtual machines. At the same time, the average number of physical hosts is 113 per enterprise.
• The average perceived virtual machine to physical host consolidation ratio is 9.8:1, i.e. on average enterprises believe that each of their physical hosts is hosting 9.8 virtual machines.
• However, by calculating the ratio of virtual machines to physical hosts for each individual enterprise, the actual average consolidation ratio comes to 6.3:1.
• Of those enterprises using virtualization, 84% use VMware, 61% use Microsoft Hyper-V, 55.4% use Citrix Xen and 12% use other hypervisors.
• 58% of enterprises use VMware as their primary hypervisor, 20.2% use Citrix Xen, 18.6% use Microsoft Hyper-V and 3% use another hypervisor*.
• Enterprises have identified a number of barriers to increased virtualization penetration:
  • 38.8% cited concerns about reliability
  • 37% cited the need to wait for a hardware refresh before deployment
  • 32.4% cited concerns around application performance
  • 32.4% cited concerns around backup and restoration
  • 30.8% cited concerns around managing the virtual estate
• 81.4% of enterprises using virtualization are planning to increase their level of server virtualization in the next 12 months.

“While the results show that virtualization has become a standard technology in most enterprises, it is clear that there is still room for increased penetration. We would expect to see consolidation ratios increase over time as organizations look to magnify the ROI they get from virtualization,” Timashev said. “We’ll be publishing the V-index results each quarter and, over time, will develop V-index.com into a community portal with real-time polls and community-driven content.”

*While the V-index focuses on server virtualization, it is possible that Virtual Desktop Infrastructures were also included in this statistic, due to the server-based nature of the technology. This in turn may have affected the reported statistics for primary hypervisor usage.

About the V-index:

The V-index was performed in Q2 2011, surveying 544 large-scale enterprises across the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany. The study was performed by Vanson Bourne, an independent market research company. For more information please visit http://www.v-index.com/.