TheInfoPro, an independent research company for the IT industry, released its fall 2009 Server Study showing slow but recovering x86 server deployments, contrasted by strong growth in deployments of VMware, Windows Server, and Linux, primarily Red Hat. The survey was made available on December 7th.

VMware is still the leading vendor in use and in plan for server virtualization, and few users report firm plans to switch from VMware to Hyper-V. However, parallel deployment of Hyper-V, Citrix, and Red Hat virtualization capabilities could signal a challenge to VMware’s dominance; this implies that heterogeneous environments will be commonplace, where VMware is used for production, and Hyper-V may grow through deployments for development and testing.