The Wikibon survey on virtualization, although focused on vSphere adoption and VMware use in general, also provides some evidence of growing interest in other hypervisors among VMware users, says Wikibon Analyst Scott Lowe in his new Alert “VMware’s hypervisor hold may be waning”.

This year’s survey, for the first time, included a question asking what other hypervisors besides VMware, if any, respondents were using in-house. The survey did not ask for any further information, such as how those alternative hypervisors were being used or what plans the respondents were considering for them.

The surprising result was that 56% of the 158 respondents reported having at least one other hypervisor in house: 35% reported having VMware and one other, 26% reported having two, while 8% reported three or four. While Lowe is careful to emphasize that no trend can be extrapolated from this single data point since we do not know how many of these respondents had more than one hypervisor in house in 2011 or 2010, the implication is that VMware’s stranglehold on the hypervisor market may be loosening.

Of those reporting having more than one hypervisor in house, Hyper-V was the most common second system reported, followed fairly closely by Citrix, with KVM, Oracle and other products having small followings.

Lowe draws three conclusions from this information:

1. Most VMware users are at least testing alternative hypervisors, although how and if they will put them into production remains to be seen.
2. Of the VMware competitors, Hyper-V is the most popular, followed fairly closely by Citrix.
3. The potential for growth in multi-hypervisor environments will make multiplatform management tools important.

Lowe does not see this as an indication that VMware users are dissatisfied. However, he suggests that CIOs should not be afraid to consider alternatives, particularly for specialized parts of their environment such as desktop virtualization or Windows platforms in remote locations. They should consider all options to be sure the hypervisor(s) they use meet both technical and budgetary needs.

Like all Wikibon community research, this Professional Alert is available in its entirety without charge on the Wikibon.org Web site. Interested IT professionals are invited to register on the Wikibon site, which allows them to read, correct, and comment on this and other Wikibon research as well as receive Wikibon’s Peer Incite announcements and newsletters.

SiliconAngle and Wikibon will be covering the VMware 2012 conference with live webcasts from The Cube on the show floor Monday August 27 through Thursday August 30. Watch the coverage on www.siliconangle.tv.