For more than 2 decades, organizations have relied on virtualization technologies to deliver innovative applications and services that streamline operations, optimize costs, and promote new business opportunities. The introduction of virtual machines into datacenters helped IT teams efficiently use resources, improve flexibility, and optimize infrastructure performance. As public cloud resources became more accessible, virtualization platforms evolved to make use of the scalability, agility, and potential cost benefits offered by new cloud computing models. Now, many organizations are reassessing their virtualization platforms and strategies to ensure they have the right combination of consistency, efficiency, and support for their future operations and cloudbased applications.

These organizations want to rapidly migrate to a unified, cost-effective platform that can handle their existing virtual machines while preparing them for IT modernization. Even so, Gartner® expects “despite cloud migration and container adoption, 70% of datacenter x86 workloads will continue to use hypervisor-based virtualization through 2027 (down from approximately 80% in 2020).”1