Eighteen percent of respondents said they were "very familiar" with chip-assisted virtualization technology, such as Intel Corp.'s VT or Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s AMD-V. Meanwhile, a third of respondents claimed to be "very familiar" with either hardware-assisted virtualization, which promises to offer faster performance than VMware's more software-heavy approach, or open-source virtualization software such as Xen, Open VZ or Virtual Iron.

That suggests that for now, VMware has less to fear from upstarts than the reporting in the technology press may make it appear, Neal said.

"It's a classic technology adoption pattern: a ton of buzz, followed by not much activity, and then more sales several years later. Virtualization is not immune from it," Neal said. "From this survey, we're not seeing a lot of people actively researching and evaluating new technologies. It's still mostly an opportunistic buy: 'Hey, I need to buy a new server, so I might as well take a look at virtualization.'"