Virtualization is evolving — Here's how organizations are shaping the future

Today Red Hat released a new report on the state of virtualization, revealing critical insights into how forward-thinking organizations are leveraging modern virtualization and containers to drive innovation and achieve unprecedented agility. This report, which surveyed 1,010 IT decision makers and virtualization practitioners in the United States, United Kingdom and the Asia-Pacific region, underscores the desire for shifting virtualization needs and strategies of many forward looking organizations. 

Enterprise IT is cloud-powered and virtualized

Today, many companies are combining virtualization with hybrid and multicloud environments to gain more flexibility, scalability, and control over their IT systems. Red Hat's state of virtualization report confirms this reality, revealing that a significant 72% of surveyed organizations are running workloads in multiple clouds, and a commanding 85% are embracing the hybrid cloud model. Virtualization plays a central role in this strategy. About 71% of organizations say more than half of their IT infrastructure is virtualized—including servers, storage, networking, desktops, and GPUs—creating more flexible and resilient systems. 

Recognizing that mission-critical workloads often exist, and can move, between different  environments, from AWS and Google Cloud to Microsoft Azure and on-premise datacenters, leading businesses are actively seeking hybrid solutions that enable consistent operations across their entire infrastructure footprint. To maintain a competitive edge, these organizations are strategically adopting platforms that can manage diverse workloads while prioritizing peak performance, effective security and optimal efficiency. This goes beyond managing virtualization—it’s about running a hybrid environment that can adapt and scale with the business.

Common concerns prompt reassessment of existing virtualization platforms

While virtualization remains a key part of enterprise IT, significant limitations in traditional virtualization platforms are becoming increasingly apparent. Licensing costs, cumbersome management complexities and vendor lock-in restrictions are top-of-mind concerns. This stagnation in traditional virtualization is hindering innovation and demanding a new approach. Consequently, organizations are demonstrating a clear appetite for change. A majority of organizations surveyed note that they are highly likely to switch to a different hypervisor platform in the next three years, with 43% reporting that they are very/extremely likely and 33% reporting that they are somewhat likely. The message is clear: the market is in motion. Organizations want virtualization solutions that better align with their cost and management goals. 

Virtualization is here to stay, but platform needs are evolving

Even as needs evolve, virtualization still delivers clear and lasting value. Two out of three organizations reported fully achieving or surpassing their virtualization goals across a range of operational benefits including:], ability to enable cloud strategy (72%) ,improved disaster security (72%), and reduction in hardware dependency (68%) ranks at the top across organizations. Virtualization is also steadily expanding its reach to an increasing array of mission-critical workloads, including vital business applications, complex databases, high-performance computing environments and advanced networking infrastructure.

Despite these successes, the  demands placed on virtualization platforms are rapidly evolving. Today's enterprises are prioritizing solutions that deliver not only superior performance but also intelligent automation, AI-powered insights and effortless scalability with seamless integration into existing IT ecosystems. Organizations require platforms that not only address their immediate needs but also possess the inherent flexibility and intelligence to adapt to the unforeseen challenges and opportunities of tomorrow. This shift calls for more than just virtualization, it requires intelligent and efficient ways to manage and orchestrate infrastructure to meet these demands.

Respondents make it clear that their landscapes extend beyond traditional virtualization. With the accelerating adoption of containers, forward-thinking businesses are actively seeking unified solutions that seamlessly bridge the gap between virtual machines and containers. This convergence empowers them to modernize applications at their own pace without compromising the stability of their existing infrastructure. The future belongs to platforms that support and enable this dual reality, providing organizations with the comprehensive, consistent set of tools and processes they need to innovate without constraint.

Workload migration is inevitable, but it’s not always a smooth journey

The momentum driving hypervisor shifts is unmistakable. Survey results show a clear desire for a change in platform strategy: 70% of organizations have recently moved or are currently moving all or part of their VM workloads from their existing virtualization platform to a new or additional hypervisor platform. This mass migration emphasizes the increasing desire to move towards a modern virtualization platform that satisfies immediate and future needs. While the intent to migrate is strong, execution remains a challenge across a variety of factors. Many expect migrations to take over a year, with concerns around:

• Complexity of data being migrated: 34%
• Time required for testing/validation: 34%
• Migration of network/security/policy definitions: 33%

The future of IT embraces complexity and diversity

Virtualization is here to stay, with nearly all respondents viewing virtualization as a key enabler of productivity and innovation in their organizations. 

The Red Hat state of virtualization report indicates that organizations will continue to diversify their environments with a steady push towards containers and a modernized infrastructure. This shift is most likely the result of the need for greater flexibility, scalability and efficiency when deploying a mix of applications and complex AI models. Over the next three years, top changes to virtualization strategies include:

• Optimizing across hybrid/multicloud environments (46%)
• Unifying virtualization and containerized workloads on a single platform (39%)
• Modernizing traditional workloads (37%)

AI is a critical element for forward-thinking organizations, with respondents indicating that generative AI (gen AI) will be a key contributor to the future of virtualization management and operations. As virtualized workloads expand across increasingly diverse environments, AI emerges as a key aspect in virtualization management

Organizations need a platform for the future that prevents vendor lock-in with simple migration options and unified management for all workloads, including AI deployments, to fully realize the benefits of virtualization.

Want to learn more? Download the full state of virtualization report to explore the trends, insights, and strategies shaping the future of enterprise IT.