On the final day of Interop NY 2008, we conducted a second quick poll of attendees (check out the first poll on virtualization here), asking which hypervisors were currently in use. In asking the question, we had certain assumptions – mainly that most people were currently using VMware – and that the real question here was to gauge how quickly Microsoft Hyper-V adoption was coming along. The results both confirmed what we thought and surprised us.
The Results:
Which hypervisor(s) are you currently using?
- 72% VMware
- 17% Using something else
- 9% Hyper-V and VMware
- 2% Hyper-V
(based on 46 responses)
So the VMware responses were in line with what we thought, although I’ve seen numbers up to 90% share of the market. And about 10% are at least playing with Hyper-V – pretty good numbers just a few months out from launch. But look at 17% using a hypervisor other than Hyper-V and VMware!
We know from talking with people that several brought up Xen. I have to tell you that other than from media and analysts, we never hear about Xen (Citrix), which is why we didn’t include it in the survey as a specific selection. Perhaps it took the introduction of Hyper-V, with the attendant marketing juggernaut, to break people of the VMware-only habit. Xen couldn’t really carry that “heterogeneous” hypervisor environment message on its own, but now that Hyper-V is available, the genie’s out of the bottle. Bears watching.
On another note: We were more successful in hanging onto our marbles on day two – people seemed more in tune to the poll and less focused on collecting giveaways than on day one! [Note: no attendees were irrevocably harmed during the execution of the polls. :)] At Interop Vegas, May 17 – 19, 2009, we’ll be about a year out from Microsoft launching Hyper-V and will make sure to ask the same question then to track changes in hypervisor adoption.
