Magic Quadrant
for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure
Gartner RAS Core Research Note Thomas J. Bittman, George J. Weiss, Mark A. Margevicius, Philip Dawson, 30 June 2011,
RV3A207052012
The number of installed server VMs and containers has nearly
doubled in the past year as competition improves, virtualization
adoption expands, the midmarket heats up, desktop virtualization
drives more workloads to servers and workloads are deployed by
cloud computing providers.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
As of mid-2011, at least 40% of x86 architecture workloads have been virtualized on servers;
furthermore, the installed base is expected to grow five-fold from 2010 through 2015 (as
both the number of workloads in the marketplace grow and as penetration grows to more
than 75%). A rapidly growing number of midmarket enterprises are virtualizing for the first
time, and have several strong alternatives from which to choose. Virtual machine (VM) and
operating system (OS) software container technologies are being used as the foundational
elements for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing offerings and for private
cloud deployments. x86 server virtualization infrastructure is not a commodi