In research sponsored by Sage Research and published in its recent Sage/CMB market Pulse newsletter, Windows is the predominant platform for hosting virtual machines.

Up to 96% of respondents in the survey say that they run a Windows-based virtualization host. The other operating systems did not fare that badly either.

Excerpt from Information Week:

The runner-up was Linux, with 52% of the respondents using the open source operating system. UNIX was third at 30% and Solaris fourth at 29%. The figures do not add up to 100% because sites in some cases are using multiple brands of operating system in their virtual machines. The Mac OS was used by 12% of respondents and NetWare by 6%.

The report did not specify how many virtual machines were there of each kind, neither is there information about the virtualization software used. As such, it is unclear how much the results could be skewed as a result of popular options, such as the Windows-based version of VMware Server or the Linux-based ESX platform.

Certainly, the 12% using the Mac OS are unlikely to be running server-type applications on it. Instead, they are probably using virtualization as a way to gain access to native Windows applications.

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