Server virtualisation market reaching its peak, VMware still on top

The worldwide server virtualisation market has matured rapidly over the last few years, with analyst firm Gartner stating the market is reaching its peak. VMware is still dominating the market, with Microsoft working its way in as a contender for enterprise use.

According to Gartner, the market is expected to reach $5.6 billion in 2016, an increase of 5.7% from 2015.

Despite the overall market increase, Gartner says new software licenses have declined for the first time since the market became mainstream more than a decade ago.

According to Michael Warrilow, research director at Gartner, growth is now being driven by maintenance revenue, which indicates a rapidly maturing software market segment.

"The market has matured rapidly over the last few years, with many organisations having server virtualisation rates that exceed 75%, illustrating the high level of penetration,” explains Warrilow, speaking ahead of the Gartner Infrastructure, Operations & Data Centre Summit in Sydney.

The market remains dominated by VMware, however, Microsoft has worked its way in as a mainstream contender for enterprise use, Warrilow says.  There are also several niche players including Citrix, Oracle and Red Hat, in addition to an explosion of vendors in the domestic China market.

While server virtualisation remains the most common infrastructure platform for x86 server OS workloads in on-premises data centres, Warrilow says the impact of new computing styles and approaches will be increasingly significant for this market. This includes OS container-based virtualisation and cloud computing.

“The trends are varying by organisation size more than ever before,” says Warrilow.

According to Gartner, usage of server virtualisation among organisations with larger IT budgets remained stable during 2014 and 2015. 

“It continues to be an important and heavily used technology for these businesses, but this market segment is approaching saturation,” Warrilow explains.

“In contrast, organisations with smaller IT budgets expect a further decline in usage through to at least 2017. This is causing an overall decline in new spending for on-premises server virtualization,” he says.

Gartner believes that organisations are increasing their usage of "physicalisation," choosing to run servers without virtualisation software. More than 20 % of these organisations expect to have less than one-third of their x86 server OSs virtualised by 2017 — twice the amount reported for 2015. However, Warrilow says the underlying rationales remain varied.

“The rise of software-defined infrastructure (SDI) and hyperconverged integrated systems (HCIS) are providing new options,” he explains.

“It has put pressure on best-of-breed virtualisation vendors to add more out-of-the-box functionality and provide a better experience and faster time-to-value.

"What was considered as the best approach to greater infrastructure agility only a few years ago, is becoming challenged by an array of newer infrastructure choices,” says Warrilow.