Hypervisor Market Share – ControlUp Perspective

We have the special privilege at ControlUp to see a picture – far and wide, of the way IT organizations are built. Our customers anonymous data can provide some very interesting insights, buried within the big data. This time we set our eyes on the ongoing competition between hypervisors – who’s on top? Who took the gold medal? What are all those different organizations using?

To answer these questions, we analyzed data from 24,000 hosts in 758 organizations. Here’s what we found:

VMware was the most popular hypervisor in this sample. 84% of all hypervisors in our dataset run vSphere. The next runner up, lagging far behind, is The Citrix XenServer with 10%, while Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Nutanix’s AHV only take up 4% and 2%, respectively.

When looking at the percentage of organizations using each kind of hypervisor, the result is slightly different, but the overall picture is the same – VMWare vSphere prevails:

68% of organizations use VMWare, 18% Citrix, 11% Hyper-V and 4% AHV.

What about the breakdown of hypervisor versions in the various organizations? Which versions are the most popular?  As we’ll see, most ESXis are new – versions 6 or 6.5, which make up over 81 % of the VMWare hosts used.

Next up is the XenServer, or as it is known today – Citrix Hypervisor.

As you can see, version 7.1 is the most common with over 41% of Citrix hosts. A far second, version 6.5 commands over 12%.

Next up, we have Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

Among Hyper-Vs, over 44% are using Server 2012 R2 Datacenter.

Last but not least, we have Nutanix’s Acropolis Hypervisor.