This FOCUS End User Survey Research  Report examines examines experiences of 250+ advanced virtualization users and analyzes: the current adoption of various types of virtualization and hypervisors, business drivers and actual benefits, pain points and barriers to growth, priorities and feature requirements for virtualization management, applications being/not being virtualized and more.

The FOCUS Research Series: Managing the Virtual Environment uses a taxonomy of virtualization management which covers key management areas identified by FOCUS. These areas include Virtual Machine (VM) Life Cycle Management and Provisioning, Capacity Management, Performance Management, Fault Management and Root Cause Analysis, Storage Management and Data Protection, and Security Management. Each area brings a set of requirements that IT must consider in order to develop a well-managed virtual infrastructure. This research series shows where user priorities are across these management areas, as well as user ratings on required features within each area. 
 

The results of the FOCUS survey show a wide variety of interesting trends and changes in the virtualization landscape. This FOCUS User Survey Report discusses the current use of and drivers for virtualization technologies, along with the reasons why some users have not implemented virtualization. For those who have virtualization running in production environments, the report details how virtualization is being utilized and for what application workloads, plus what benefits companies have realized due to the implementation of virtualization. This report also covers what virtualization solutions are being utilized, what pain points and challenges came up as part of the implementation experience, what users are utilizing to manage the virtual infrastructure today, and what their priorities are going forward. Additionally, user purchasing patterns and priorities are discussed, ending with a FOCUS assessment of the survey results.