Between May and August 2006, Forrester Research surveyed 1,770 companies on their adoption of virtualization technologies. 40% of the respondents said they’ve virtualized production servers (up from 29% in 2005). 11% are in evals. More impressively, as InfoWorld reports:
“Awareness of virtualization by Global 2000 large enterprises grew to 92% in 2006 from 87% in 2005. Awareness by medium-to-large businesses jumped to 86% from 60% and to 83% from 62% by SMBs.”
And which virtualization vendors are these companies familiar with? VMWare (53%). I was surprised that only one respondent mentioned Xen, but the upcoming Xen-integrated RHEL5 might change that. 6 mentioned Solaris Containers, which Joyent offers. SWSoft’s Virtuozzo was notably absent from the list; I think its focus on web hosting providers as a distribution channel might be at least partially to blame.
Within the web hosting industry, the predominant virtualization use case has been VPS hosting, where the goal is to put multiple customers on a physical server. Customers typically choose between pre-packaged service plans with fix resource allocations; they have no control over VPS density, and no ability to create additional virtual environments with excess capacity.
But out in the enterprise IT world, people find virtualization appealing because it gives them beyond the box access to computing resources. Imagine the difference between opening a 2-liter soda bottle every time you’re thirsty, versus being able to pour any amount of its content into a glass.
Unfortunately, this architecture isn’t all that compatible with the web hosting business model. Dedicated hosting providers want customers to deploy as many servers as possible, instead of piling multiple operating systems and software applications onto the same machine until it reaches full utilization. Aside from the obvious objective of maximizing revenue by increasing customer server count, there are also logistical considerations such as software license and IP address management. And shared hosting providers are heavily dependent on overselling capacity.
The question, can web hosting providers hold on to the “soda only comes in 2 liter bottles (which, in our hands, can be stretch out to a couple dozen 1 liter servings)” paradigm forever when prospective customers have near-total awareness of more flexible alternatives?
