This editorial was originally published on May 5, 2015. It is being re-run as Steve is out of town.

I went to a talk recently where I saw this statistic: "50% of all workloads were virtualized in 2009. That number is 72% today."

That's a really big number, at least in my mind. That implies the vast majority of all servers, file, print, database, email, etc. are virtualized. Inside of companies that have their own data centers and machines, they must be heavily virtualized. I'm sure that all those instances in the "cloud" also count, but still, 72%? That's big.

However I'm sure that's skewed towards those machines that don't require a lot of resources, like file and print servers, DNS hosts, etc. This week, I thought I'd see what the percentage is inside of your organization.

What percentage of your SQL Servers are virtualized?

Give us numbers of physical v virtual if you can. I'd combine all instances, from development to test to production, not worrying about size or workload. If you have a single guest on a host, using almost all the resources, that's a virtual server.

My suspicion is that the percentage of SQL Servers is much lower than that of other workloads, but I'm curious. With the low overhead of modern hypervisors, and the free (or low) cost, it makes sense to virtualize servers. If for no other reason than to remove any weird hardware dependencies for DR purposes. However I'm sure that there are large workloads that require more resources than the current hypervisors can expose, at least for some database instances, and those need to remain on physical machines, but my guess is more often than not, it's the human concerns or lack of confidence that prevents virtualization.

Let us know this week how your organization is doing in the trend towards virtual servers.