It's not much of a surprise that Microsoft is emphasising the message that only 10% of server workloads are virtualised today. While it's possibly true, and I can't argue that specific point, it certainly doesn't paint the full picture of the current state.

Hydrasight research conducted in Australia/New Zealand during 2007 shows that more than 40% of organisations have adopted server virtualisation in some capacity (i.e., test/development, production, both). Of these, 80% were using VMware.

Do the maths.

A third of the server virtualisation market have already chosen VMware… and it's not much of a stretch to predict that they're going to significantly increase the proportion of their server workloads that are virtualised during 2008.

Sure, Microsoft/Hyper-V is going to have an impact but there's a vested interest for them—and others—in clouding the water so as to buy time and, as Hydrasight said in 2006, not be too late to the party. This week's message from Redmond was that virtualisation is about more than just server. A revelation!

I'm not a Microsoft-basher by default, but I haven't come across many organisations that would rush a first-generation hypervisor into production usage. Moreover, all the existing Microsoft adages also apply (wait for Service Pack 1 before deploying, don't expect reliability before version 3, etc). So Windows Server 2008/Hyper-V won't make significant inroads into the data centre before 2010.

It's Hydrasight's published opinion that more than a third of server workloads on industry-standard Intel/AMD enterprise servers will be virtualised before 2012. That's a conservative figure, imho.

And don't get me started on virtualisation management (or security)…