Windows 7 OS To Encourage Virtualization Reckons VMWare

The release of the Microsoft’s latest OS upgrade Windows 7 should step-up the adoption of virtualisation technology, but it won’t essentially induce a significant shift from physical to virtual desktops, according to a VMware executive.

Several industry experts are of the opinion that a large number of IT customers have been waiting for the launch of Windows 7 to embrace virtualisation.

Bogomil Balkansky, VMware’s VP of product marketing, has opined that although the release of Windows 7 would perhaps draw the attention of IT professionals and customers to the notion of virtualisation technology, but he doesn’t see an immediate growth in adoption.  

The prediction comes at the backdrop of Gartner’s new report claiming that only around 16 percent of the existing workloads are currently running on virtual machines.

However, the market analyst firm forecasted a substantial growth in the virtualisation domains, with the total count of workloads running on virtual machines is expected to reach 50 percent by 2012, constituting around 58 million deployed machines.

It further predicted that the most rapidly growing market for the virtualisation technology will be the small and medium-sized business sector.

Tom Bittman, VP at Gartner, said in a statement: “For years the entry point was simply too high for small enterprises, but increased competition by server vendors has enable smaller firms to embrace virtualisation”.