Virtual Servers overtaking Physical Servers

Interesting news article on Microscope which shows that virtualisation is really here to stay.  Analysts IDC are predicting that the virtual/physical server ratio will be 3:2 by 2013.

This clearly demonstrates that virtualisation is now mainstream - no longer an experimental technology only used for development and testing, but a production ready technology which is widely adopted.

The analysts also warn that this increased adoption of virtualisation will increase the requirement for management applications to control virtual machine sprawl - it is now easier than ever to provision server resource so administrators need to ensure that valuable resource is not wasted, thus damaging the economics of virtualisation.

Outsourced hosting of virtual environments will reduce the need for investment in such tools, as the hosting provider will have already made the investment on behalf of their customers.   Hosting also reduces the need for such rigorous capacity planning - sizing of the physical environment becomes the provider’s problem, not the customer’s.  Resource is available on demand, and can be switched off if not required, meaning expensive equipment is not left idle in the customer’s datacentre.