SAN FRANCISCO, USA: AppDynamics, Application Performance Management (APM) company, has announced the results of its Application Virtualization Outlook survey.

Focused on understanding enterprise efforts to virtualize business applications, the survey revealed a significant divide in the pace of adoption of virtualization for non-critical systems versus mission-critical systems.

The results show that the majority of companies have yet to move Tier 1, mission-critical applications to virtual environments. Despite widely acknowledging the benefits of virtualization, most companies noted that they need more evidence that mission-critical applications will succeed in virtual environments said a release.

According to the survey:

Application Virtualization Experiences 'VM Stall':
While 83 percent report they have virtualized their non-critical applications and systems, in stark contrast, only 14 percent of respondents reported that they have fully virtualized "Tier 1" applications.

People, Performance & Design Are Top Concerns:
When asked about the primary obstacles preventing the virtualization of mission-critical applications, respondents cited 'people issues', performance and design concerns as most the common.

Benefits are clear, Confidence is lacking:
While these concerns persist, there is wide recognition that compelling benefits exist when companies virtualize mission-critical applications. 59 percent strongly agree that virtualization would result in server consolidation and related power and cooling savings, while 49 percent strongly agree that failover/disaster recovery capabilities would improve in a virtual environment.

Yet, the majority of companies still expressed a lack of confidence that their applications could succeed in virtual environments.

"What application owners are missing is hard evidence that their application will perform acceptably once it is in a virtual environment," said Jyoti Bansal, CEO of AppDynamics.

"They are under intense pressure to ensure that applications experience 100 percent uptime and meet strict performance SLAs, and they are looking to virtualization teams to show them that this transition won't affect service quality."

"By baselining performance in the non-virtualized environment and capturing detailed performance metrics, companies can provide an apples-to-apples comparison pre-and post-virtualization. This is a great first step to encourage the virtualization of mission-critical applications," concluded Bansal.