To pitch its upcoming conference, the analysis firm Gartner just published a new forecast about virtualization: only 25% of all server workloads will be in a virtual machine by year-end 2010.
The Vice President of Research Philip Dawson also added:
Virtualization will continue as the highest-impact issue challenging infrastructure and operations through 2015, changing how you manage, how and what you buy, how you deploy, how you plan and how you charge…
Even more interestingly, Gartner reports that licensing still is a key challenge in virtualization adoption:
Virtualized licensing continues to present a major stumbling block to widespread adoption of virtualization. As vendors change their software pricing and associated license provisions to accommodate virtual use, negotiators must plan to spend an increased amount of time per contract to understand the effect of such changes on planned software use. Gartner believes that organizations that do not diligently monitor the ways each vendor is responding to virtual use issues are likely to experience significantly increased costs and the unintended impairment of their current license rights.
Starting 2007, virtualization.info highlighted Licensing as a top 10 issue in virtualization.info adoption.