What do Virtualization and Cloud executives think about 2012? Find out in this VMblog.com series exclusive.

Enterprise Virtualization - 2012 Predictions

Contributed Article by Natalia Kagramanova, Product Manager, ShoreTel

Enterprises embrace virtualization for many good reasons: server consolidation to reduce hardware and operating costs, management efficiency by leveraging virtualized infrastructure tools, ability to migrate to the cloud for agility and increased reliability.

As companies continue embracing virtualized deployment models, we predict three significant trends in the coming year:

1.     Server virtualization market will start saturating

Virtualization is a well-established trend in the enterprise market. The leading edge of this trend is server virtualization, which promises to unlock much of the underutilized server capacity. According to Nemertes, more than half of enterprise server workloads are already running in a virtualized environment.

In 2012 companies will continue virtualizing their server infrastructure, however as the market saturates, the rate at which server workloads are virtualized will start to decrease. Usually, companies target up to 70-80 percent of their server workloads for virtualization. Already, many enterprises are close to completion with over 50 percent of server workloads already virtualized.

2.     Desktop virtualization as a way to support a growing variety of devices

Virtualized desktop (VDI) brings many benefits to enterprises: better desktop management, improved remote access, and improved security, to name a few. However, VDI adoption has not taken off on a mass scale because it does not significantly reduce costs, which is a driving force among most enterprise IT projects.

In 2012 however, this will change. The pace of virtualized desktop adoption will accelerate, mainly driven by the need to support a growing variety of devices. More companies will be running virtualized desktop solution trials and more application vendors will have their solutions verified with VDI manufacturers.

3.     Microsoft will challenge VMware marketshare

VMware is currently the clear leader in server virtualization, but Microsoft is poised to challenge. VMware is more mature than Hyper-V in many respects, yet many companies, especially small and medium enterprises (SME), may find that Microsoft's Hyper-V is a better choice for them: the basic product is offered free or bundled with Windows 2008 Server, the feature set is adequate, and Windows 2008 expertise is often readily available. Recent price changes of VMware's vSphere solution may further accelerate Hyper-V adoption by SMEs and even larger Enterprises.

Enterprises of all sizes adopt virtualization as a way to improve efficiency of their IT infrastructure and decrease total cost of ownership. Customers who adopted virtualization reported better server utilization, increased applications uptime and greater IT agility and responsiveness by enabling private cloud computing. As the technology continues to improve, we will see an expansion of how and where virtualization will be used within companies from the data center, desktop to mobile screens.

###