"Virtualisation helps organisations to cut costs, better utilise assets and reduce implementation and management time and complexity, all of which are crucial in this economic environment," said Alan Dayley, research director at Gartner.

"Server virtualisation management will be the primary source of growth in the virtualisation market as hypervisor software functionality--key to virtualising a server--rapidly moves to hardware. Server virtualisation management technology in particular is designed to reduce TCO, reduce associated availability risk, and improve quality of service. In addition, building more manageability into infrastructure components provides technology suppliers with an additional source of revenue and a basis for competitive differentiation," said Dayley.

Although HVD is an emerging technology that currently represents 11 per cent of the virtualisation software revenue market, it will account for a growing proportion of corporate users through 2013. Virtual desktop infrastructure feeds additional server virtualisation needs because the users' desktop data will now need to be managed in a virtualised server environment. Maturity and acceptance will result in a significant broadening of the addressable user population by 2010 and acceleration in deployments.

Hosted virtual desktops

Gartner advises end-user organisations to define and optimise management processes for HVDs as they did for traditional PCs. Although HVD images are centralised and more standardised, the capabilities for managing them across their full deployment life cycles remain incomplete. To remedy this, they should budget for additional point-solution management capabilities.