By any measure,
server virtualisation has been an amazing success. In 10 short years, virtualisation has moved from a desktop product to datacentre mainstream.
VMware has defined the market with its vSphere hypervisor and product ecosystem, followed closely by Microsoft Hyper-V and
open source KVM and Xen.
Virtualisation provides the basis for cloud (private and public), and in terms of penetration around 80% of all datacentre workloads are virtualised, with virtual servers being the default option for new deployments.
Ease of use of virtualisation is a real boon. A physical server costs money, has to be budgeted, and takes time and effort to install and configure. By comparison, spinning up a virtual machine has only a marginal cost (once the hardware is deployed), making it much easier to create virtual machines on demand, with little fuss or effort.
