A couple of weeks ago I’ve asked you to participate in the Project VRC “State of the VDI and SBC union 2015” survey. This survey ran until February 15th, the full report including all the results will be published in a couple of weeks. I hoped you participated in this survey.
Let’s take a look at what Project VRC and the State of the VDI and SBC union actually is:
Project ‘Virtual Reality Check’ conducted the third worldwide State of the VDI and SBC union survey in January and February 2015. This survey is focused the desktop virtualization space and participants are IT Professionals who are active in the desktop virtualization industry as IT vendors, IT partners and IT departments.
The goal of the survey is to share insights about usage, configuration and trends in the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Server Based Computing industry, ‘the state of the VDI and SBC union’. About 519 participants completed the full survey. Participants come from US, UK, The Netherlands, Germany and 20+ other countries.
As a sneak preview I can already share some of the results here at my blog viktorious.nl. The original survey includes almost 50 questions.
Which hypervisor is deployed for VDI workloads?
A first question I think is interesting is which hypervisor is currently deployed for VDI workloads?
The following bar-chart offers some insights:

2015 results
Let’s compare these results with the results of the same question in 2014:

2014 results
As you can see vSphere is the most popular hypervisor for VDI workloads. Of course a shift is going on from vSphere 5.1 to 5.5; the total market share of vSphere decreased from 72,5% to 67,4%. Citrix XenServer is gaining some extra market share in this space and the Hyper-V share also slightly increased. In the 2014 version a question was asked about which hypervisor is used for server workloads, unfortunately this question was dropped in the 2015 survey.
Which storage technologies are used to host VDI desktops?
Another interesting topic is to see which storage technologies are used to host the VDI desktops. With all developments in the storage space, we could expect some interesting results here.

2015 results
And the 2014 results for the same question:

2014 results
Notice the small difference in the original question. It’s interesting to see that the share of SSD enabled SAN storage decreased and the share for SANs with only spinning disks increased. This could be explained by the significant increase in usage of full SSD SAN solutions. Unfortunately there’s no answer included in the question for Hyper Converged solutions leveraging a server-side SAN solution like Nutanix, Simplivity or EVO:RAIL/VSAN. The “other” answer increased a couple of points, maybe this represents usage of server-side SAN.
The full report
The official public release of this white paper is scheduled for Tuesday March 24. After a free registration at the projectvrc.com website you can download the report after it’s available. If you participated in the survey you probably already received the full report.
I hope this was helpful, please don’t hesitate to leave any feedback below.