"End-user organisations must build cost and benefit financial models to fully understand the financial impact of implementing HVDs, and make certain that cost and benefit exist as compared with those for traditional PCs," said Phil Dawson, research vice president at Gartner.

"There is a growing number of management providers, which represents an opportunity for end-user pricing leverage, but no vendor offers a complete set of server virtualisation management functionality. IT organisations will have to undertake, or outsource, their own virtualisation management system integration efforts or wait for better-integrated and robust toolsets," said Dawson.

Microsoft will challenge VMware

From a vendor perspective, by 2013, Microsoft will challenge VMware as the dominant vendor in the server virtualisation infrastructure market and will do very well in small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). The server virtualisation management market is currently wide open, with more than 100 vendors supplying products that meet some of the requirements in the management stack. As the management market matures, virtualisation infrastructure vendors, the "Big Four" (BMC Software, CA, HP and IBM/Tivoli) and other management vendors will build and acquire more virtualisation management capabilities, thus consolidating the market. On the other hand, the HVD vendor landscape is crowded, confusing, and full of opportunists.

Gartner recommends that vendors take advantage during this disruptive period by introducing leading-edge management tools in support of virtualisation initiatives and ensure that virtualisation-specific management products can integrate within existing management frameworks.