HUNTSVILLE, USA: IT managers are bullish on virtual server technology, anticipating that despite the near-term challenges they face, the vast majority of servers will be virtual in the coming future -– according to the results of an online opinion poll conducted by Avocent Corp. of recent VMworld attendees.

According to the opinion poll, almost half of respondents believe at least 80 percent of their servers will be virtual within two years, with one-quarter of respondents asserting the percentage may be greater than 90 percent. The reason for their bullish attitude toward virtualization is that 95 percent of respondents report that virtualization is delivering the benefits they expected, including:

* infrastructure consolidation (51 percent)
* reduced power and cooling requirements (37 percent)
* streamlined management (35 percent)
* improved availability/recovery (30 percent)
* lower hardware costs (28 percent)
* faster deployment of servers (23 percent)

"Virtualization clearly promises tremendous benefits to today's resource-constrained IT organizations, and is therefore likely to become a dominant infrastructure technology in the enterprise data center of the future," said C.C. Fridlin, P.E., director of product management for Avocent. "As IT managers gain real-world experience with virtualization, however, they are collectively developing new best practices for virtualization ownership -– as well as acquiring the skills and management tools they need to implement those best practices."

The poll also found 90 percent of respondents have faced both expected and unexpected challenges with their virtualization initiatives, with the most common issues being the need to correct misperceptions about virtualization, as well as performance and management issues.

These poll results and the challenges of managing both physical and virtual IT infrastructures at the same time will be presented at the upcoming Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand. Ivan Passos, director of product management for Avocent software products, will discuss the challenges "When Physical and Virtual Worlds Collide" on Tuesday, Nov. 27.

Poll respondents were drawn from VMworld 2007 attendees representing 60 companies of different sizes across various vertical markets. Thirty-nine percent were second wave virtualization adopters (a year or less in production), 42 percent were first wave adopters (two or three years in production) and 19 percent were leading-edge adopters (four or more years in production).