Looking to move from XXX for Virtualisation?

Interesting article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/03/v_index_server_virtualization_q3_2011/ 
(I have cleaned up this it is not a direct quote)

Virtualisation market faces shake-up, By Timothy Prickett Morgan

Posted 3rd November 2011 21:41 GMT

This info comes from the latest V-Index survey from Veeam Software, a maker of add-on management tools for VMware's ESXi hypervisor, which is conducted on a quarterly basis in the US, UK, France, and Germany.

The survey only of large companies – those with 1,000 or more employees. About a third of the companies surveyed had more than 3,000 employees.

In the September V-Index, 86.5 per cent of the 578 organisations that participated in the poll had some sort of server virtualisation in their data centres. And across all enterprises, including those who did not have server virtualisation at all, an average of 38.9 per cent of servers were virtualised, and they had an average of 701 servers in their data centres.

Primary server virtualisation hypervisors, by vendor

The penetration of various hypervisors on x86-based servers depends on whether virtualisation is being used to run virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or more traditional server workloads.

On traditional server stuff

• VMware with 67.6 per cent of those companies that have hypervisors ESX or ESXi is their primary hypervisor
• XenServer 14.4 per cent going for
• Hyper-V 16.4 per cent from Microsoft.
• Others category, which accounted for a meagre 1.6 per cent.

When you shift to talk about hypervisors running on servers to specifically stream VDI desktops:

• ESX 54.2 per cent
• XenServer 24.9 per cent
• Hyper-V by 20.3 per cent

Now here's the interesting bit: 38 per cent of companies using virtualisation for traditional workloads say they are planning to change their hypervisor next year (2012).

The cost of the current hypervisor platform was cited as the main reason for the jump by 58.9 per cent of the jumpers, with nearly half saying that they didn't like their current vendor's licensing model, and they did like the features offered with alternative suppliers or that the alternatives had matured enough that they could contemplate making a shift.