Many IT leaders believe that they have virtualized their x86 servers, but Gartner said they have to plan for two to three times the growth of virtualization in the portfolio.

Philip Dawson, vice president for research at Gartner, said that as virtualization matures, the next big thing will be automating the composition and management of the virtualized resources. Storage has already been virtualized, but primarily within the scope of individual vendor architectures. Networking is also virtualized, and the next challenge is server virtualization.

Gartner estimates that approximately 90 percent of the server market is composed of x86 architecture servers, but based on a traditional model of one application per server, roughly 80 to 90 percent of the x86 computing capacity is unused at any time.

Virtualization promises to unlock much of this underutilized capacity. As such, many IT organizations are approaching server virtualization as a cost-saving measure, and it is saving money. However, organizations that have a mature server virtualization deployment in place are leveraging virtualization for much more: faster deployments, reduced downtime, disaster recovery, variable usage accounting and usage chargeback, holistic capacity planning and more.

From a desktop perspective, hosted virtual desktops (HVDs) transfer the thick-client computing environment that runs on a PC to a server, removing some management overhead from the desktop location and allowing administrators to centralize their activities.

This centralization allows IT to move some of the management activities that sit on a PC to a server, enabling administrators to manage desktops in a central location. While this enhances flexibility for administration, it does require more computing and storage capacity at the data center level.

Gartner analysts said 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.

Mr Dawson said: “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.”

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