In a recent Hot Aisle poll of 2326 respondents, 80% say that they run some production workload on their virtualised environment, however only a tiny minority (2%) do this without restrictions on the application’s criticallity.
- 29% of respondents say that they run “all but the most critical applications” on their virtual platforms.
- 51% of respondents only run “the unimportant ones” on their virtual platforms
- Interestingly on;y 2% say they will never run production applications on virtual platforms
So it is obvious that we have come a long way but still have a way to go to make virtualisation mainstream for critical business applications.
Previous surveys (cloud soup, and hypervisor poll) of the hot aisle readership show that the main concern of end users is enterprise level support of their key applications and the full stack including the virtualisation layer.
Here are the full results:
Do you host production applications on your virtual server infrastructure?
- Yes without restrictions – 48
- Yes but not the critical ones – 621
- Yes only the unimportant ones – 1196
- Not yet but we will inside 12 months 332
- Not yet maybe after a year or more – 44
- Not yet maybe never – 42
- Never will – 43
Comment by Mark Preston on 6 October 2009:
I suspect technology is not the issue here, it’s the fear factor: Will operations manage all the eggs in one basket? Well If technology can be the salvation (and I am not suggesting it is) then the fault tolerance feature in VSphere is worthy of note. VMware have introduced the ability to clone a server and have it running alongside the donor so that if perhaps those critical warnings are ignored and the donor fails the cloned version seamlessly picks up the workload.
Comment by Steve O'Donnell on 8 October 2009:
Mark,
This is a good and relevant point, my sense is that the lack of application vendor support for deployments on VMware is a reason that the big apps are being held back.
Steve
Comment by Vittorio Viarengo on 9 October 2009:
We found that whether people aggressively virtualize mission critical applications is a factor of their confidence in the technology (that comes from knowledge and experience) and their ability to get the right level of sponsorship within the organization. According to our primary research, ISV support can be a challenge, but it got much better over the last 18 months.
It is not uncommon for customers who have a high degree of confidence to virtualize business applications despite lack of official support form the vendor
http://vittorioviarengo.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/the-virtualization-adoption-journey-key-elements/
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