Brief: The Virtualization Conundrum — Don't Plan On Getting Rid Of Your Physical Servers

Server virtualization has become a technology behind nearly everyone's business technology (BT) agenda. As an infrastructure and operations (I&O) professional, you likely found virtualization to be an immensely effective tool for improving your technology services. From their initial use as capex reduction tools to their current status as the de facto atoms for the majority of public and private clouds, hypervisor-based virtual machines (VMs) and related container abstractions support between 50% and 70% of enterprise OS images, according to our clients. Such popularity has led many observers to predict the eventual near-extinction of the physical server — a server with a single OS image running on it — and the transition of enterprise BT to a landscape of VM hosts with only a few legacy servers hanging in the wings. The truth is exactly the opposite: While VMs will reduce the total number of physical servers, the overall increase in the number of OS instances and improving VM ratios will push the proportion of physical enterprise servers higher. This report includes a simple quantitative model you can use to estimate the number of physical versus VM host servers you will have to manage, which in turn will impact your plans for systems management and automation tools and processes.