Prominent technology news magazine PC World recently conducted a poll of its readership to find trends in the field of virtualisation. Following the research, the magazine concluded virtualisation is "making inroads" into corporate data centres.

"About a third of self-identified business managers reported that they're running most of their servers on virtual machines," Logan G Harbaugh of PC World said.

The survey found that more than eight of every ten businesses had some sort of virtualisation deployed for their data network, whether it be through virtualised servers or desktop solutions. Only 26 per cent of businesses hadn't used virtualised solutions for their business, the poll showed.

One-third of respondents said they used server virtualisation on the job and those overseeing the results deemed that even small- to medium-sized businesses had increased their investments in the virtualisation arena. The PC World staff also posited that desktop virtualisation services had likely grown, and would continue to in the future.

However, the general impression of the survey was that the industry is in a transition period with virtualisation, as businesses figure out how to best utilise it.

"Beyond having made a start, the next big steps in implementing virtualisation are setting up provisioning and management utilities, and optimizing the infrastructure with high performance storage and networking to improve the number of VMs [virtual machines] per server and allow for the implementation of private clouds," Harbaugh wrote.

Businesses deploying virtualisation often receive the benefits of increase business agility and flexibility, he said.

PC World poll shows rise in virtualisation rates