IDC publishes predictions for Virtualization in 2014

 In 2010, IDC has previously forecasted that, by 2014, 70 per cent of all servers would become virtual. That prediction has largely come to bear, as Gartner estimated that Windows is now 60 to 70 per cent virtualized, with Linux about 35 to 45 per cent there. Moreover, between the legacy physical systems in place, the decline in server shipments and the large proportion of virtualized environments, hardly any system shipped today is not virtual.

In other words, virtualization is the prevalent and dominant mode and physical server deployment is extremely rare. This holds true across all sectors, industries and company sizes. Costs have long been a primary driver for virtualization adoption. That will be the case even more so in 2014, as small home businesses and traditional SMBs adopt virtualization en masse to more efficiently distribute the costs of expensive hardware.
Secondary drivers of virtualization adoption include flexibility and scalability. Virtualization makes it easy to rearrange any set-up and re-distribute workloads seamlessly.
While servers are already largely virtualized, it is time for network and storage hardware to follow suit. On the storage front, virtualization is becoming more and more relevant.
I predict that 2014 will see the first (baby) steps of cloud IaaS and virtualization convergence, as solutions emerge that allow seamless migration of workloads from on-premise virtual environments to the cloud and back. In fact, it has been predicted that the boundary between cloud and on-premise virtual will be all but gone by 2018.
One of the important consequences of BYOD is the shift of workloads from endpoints (such as desktops or laptops) toward servers. This means that organizations will need to engage more server-based computing resources, driving the adoption of virtualization.