Which 50% will you virtualize?

PC World recently published an article on Hyper-V R2 competing with VMware vSphere.  I found this statement from Bob Kelly, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Infrastructure Server Marketing, to be remarkable:

“That’s why I still maintain that at some point, you’ll be at 40 percent to 50 percent virtualized and you’re 50 percent physical, and that’s an important thing to recognize. If you recognize that, you can set the strategy. It’s not, ‘Oh God, we thought the world was going to be only virtual.’ That, fundamentally, is why I think VMware is in trouble,” he said.

In related news, Gartner recently predicted that 50% of all x86 server workloads will be virtualized by 2012.  Still no word on what happens in 2013, after global virtualization limits have been reached.  [Better start looking for some investors that can help me get VM cap-and-trade started.]

But seriously, many companies have already instituted “virtualization first” policies and deploying new apps on physical hardware requires sign-off from upper management.  If Bob Kelly is correct, half of all provisioning requests seek waivers from this policy?  Incomprehensible.

Bob Kelly also explained the true cause of server sprawl in that same article.  If you’re like me, you probably thought it was because of DLL Hell — complex product dependencies that made it extremely risky to manage multiple applications on a single Windows NT system — and SMP scalability problems.  Nope, it turns out that the real issue was the need for sufficient capacity to accommodate peak demand… wink, wink.

Which 50% will you virtualize?

Related posts:

1. VMware ESX 4 can even virtualize itself
2. Single Pane of Glass — Hyper-V Edition