A new study called the V-Index, commissioned by virtualization management vendor Veeam and carried out by research firm Vanson Bourne, provides a look into the split-up of the virtualization market. It found that 58 percent of companies that deployed x86 virtualization software, 92 percent of 540 respondents chose VMware vSphere as their primary hypervisor. Citrix’s XenServer follows 20.2 percent that Microsoft’s Hyper-V comes in third with 18.6 percent. Three percent of the respondents said they were using an “other hypervisor.”

VMware currently holds the largest share of the virtualization market, but its competition is making progress, thanks to some policy changes the company implemented recently.

“Microsoft’s share could continue to increase because of anger among VMware customers over new licensing prices. In postings on a VMware community forum, one customer professed to be “totally floored” by the new prices, while another used the phrase “still in shock” and claimed to be emailing a VMware sales rep to complain.”

The price increases arrived in the same timeframe VMware announced vSphere 5.0. The new offering can support VMs with up to 32 virtual cores, and each VM can support up to 1TB of RAM.  vSphere 5.0 also includes the VMware vSphere Storage Appliance, a virtualization product for SMBs, VMware vShield 5 and VMware vCentre Site Recovery Manager 5.

Despite of the bigger price tag, VMware manages to maintain its leadership position – in total, 84 percent of the companies surveyed said they were using the hypervisor, even if not as their main one. However, competitors are always breathing down the company’s neck.

Citrix acquired Cloud.com for “less than $200 million” last week in hopes to strengthen its virtualization portfolio, to the dislike of some of its investors, while vKernel today announced a new developer program as well as an application programming interface to its Capacity Analytics Engine products line-up.