According to a recent survey by Yankee group and Sunbelt software, over three quarters of the worlds companies either are planning to virtualise or already have begun the process.

The survey also states that the main reason that companies are virtualising is reducing infrastructure costs and disaster recovery. Other reasons people are virtualising includes increasing server utilisation rates, physical space consolidation and application deployment. VMWare appears to be the clear winner with a total market share of 55 percent compared to the next competitor Microsoft with a 29 percent market share. Meanwhile Xen, the open source alternative appears to have slow takeup with only 1 percent market share.

VMWare ESX server was the leading product with just under half of all virtualisation or planned virtualisation deployments in the survey, meanwhile GSX server only had 10 percent of the total which is not surprising as VMWare now offers a free upgrade path from GSX to ESX.

Only 4 percent of respondants to the survey had no plans to install a virtualisation solution at all.

The fact that so many companies are taking up virtualisation is astonishing. The growth rate of virtualisation world wide in the past three years has been snowballing and this survey is just more proof of that. Microsoft's purchase of Connectix and creation of their own virtual product line was an attempt to get on the train that did not quite work as planned and this is proven in the survey results. Microsoft needs to really make some serious moves with their hypervisor product in order to catch the market leader VMWare.

If this trend continues, the virtualisation arena will not only become heated but will provide us with more options and solutions. These solutions will enable companies to consolidate hardware, utilise existing hardware to optimum capacity and reduce TCO costs. They will also give us true disaster recovery solutions, high availability to meet those unrealistic sla's and the shift in mindset from servers to services. Once the mindset changes, IT departments will be able to leverage operation frameworks like ITIL successfully and easily.

There has been an explosion of virtualisation takeup and technology. Not only in the server consolidation space but in the hardware consolidation space as well. The numbers of companies virtualising storage and networking technologies also continues to grow. If you are not virtualising now then you should be planning to do it as one year ago it was the next big thing. Now that it is the big thing, do not let yourself be in the four percent of people who are watching the train pass them and their companies by. You may well regret it.