Last week Gartner released a press announcement disclosing that only 16% of workloads run inside virtual machines at present.
The analysis firm predicted that this amount is going to reach around 50% by 2012, which is equal to 58 million deployed virtual machines.
Gartner also adds:
…by year-end 2010, enterprises with 100-999 employees will have a higher penetration of virtual machines deployed than the Global 500…
In May 2007 for example Gartner predicted that virtualization will be part of nearly every aspect of IT by 2015.
In April 2008 Gartner also said that 4 million virtual machines were expected by 2009, while we would have 611 million virtualized PCs by 2011.