Veeam Software is sponsoring an ongoing study to show how deep virtualization is spreading into the enterprise. Called the V-index, the study is being conducted by Vanson Bourne, an independent market research company. It is based on a survey of more than 500 enterprises in the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany. It is designed to measure three parameters – virtualization rate, consolidation ratio and primary hypervisor in use.

For the second quarter, the study found that 39.4% of all servers are now virtualized. France has the highest penetration with 45% of its servers having virtualization. Germany came in second at 45.1% and the U.S. at 37.2%.

The V-index calculates the average consolidation ratio across large enterprises by comparing the ratio of virtual machines to physical hosts for each individual enterprise. Results show that the average is 6:3 for each enterprise.

VMware is unsurprisingly the hypervisor of choice. About 58% of enterprises use VMware as their primary hypervisor, 20.2% use Citrix Xen, 18.6% use Microsoft Hyper-V and 3% use another hypervisor.

Some of the other findings:

The average number of physical servers in an enterprise is 664.
91.9% of all enterprises are using virtualization to some degree.
Of these enterprises, each has on average 470 virtual machines.
At the same time, the average number of physical hosts is 113 per enterprise.

The V-Index also looked at the issues with enterprises have with increasing their use of virtualization:

• 38.8% cited concerns about reliability.
• 37% cited the need to wait for a hardware refresh before deployment.
• 32.4% cited concerns around application performance.
• 32.4% cited concerns around backup and restoration.
• 30.8% cited concerns around managing the virtual estate

The key here is in the barriers that virtualization has in adoption. It points to the inadequacy of the enterprise infrastructure and the need for IT transformation. The network is showing its inadequacy to some extent. That points to a need for services organizations to help the enterprise make the shift to a modern virtualized infrastructure.