Last week IDC published its Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker for Q4 2009, reporting an increase in the amount of servers used for virtualization.
18.2% of all new servers shipped in the last quarter of last year in fact were virtualized, compared to 15.2% in the same period of 2008.
Despite that, the total amount of virtualized servers in 2009 was 5% less than in 2008, with a 14% decline in spending for virtualization hosts.
Virtualization software revenue didn’t go much better:
Worldwide virtualization software revenue for all CPU types declined 10% year over year in 4Q09 to $447 million, thanks primarily to economic pressures and an increasingly competitive marketplace. Virtualization licenses increased 13% year over year and 21% sequentially in the quarter but declined 7% for all of 2009.
HP continues to lead the market with 38% of all virtualization hosts shipments, followed by Dell and IBM. IBM was the only vendor with positive growth in 2009, increasing 1%.
The most interesting news anyway is about the hypervisors market share (our emphasis):
VMware ESX continues to be the number 1 virtualization platform with total licenses increasing 19% year over year in 4Q09. VMware Server continues to be the number 2 virtualization platform despite declining 9% year over year. Microsoft Hyper-V continued its ascent, capturing the third highest market share by growing 215% year over year, albeit off a small base. Meanwhile, Virtual Server 2005, with the fourth largest share, continued its depreciation with year-over-year licenses declining 29%. Citrix XenServer also showed impressive year-over-year growth of 290% and rounded out the top 5, coming off its third quarter of offering the product for free with certain management functionality. XenServer’s sequential growth was a relatively modest 25%…