VMware is having a tough time in maintaining its position as only game that is used by big time virtualization projects. However, it’s true that all the Fortune 100 companies, including staunch rival Microsoft is a customer of VMware. Interestingly, according to the latest reports by Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant, VMware is no longer the topmost vendor of the x86 virtualization market.

The newest ranking by Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant was released last week. It states that Microsoft, Citrix are equally placed with VMware. The past year ranking had shown VMware as the top most company in the domain.
VMware stands first with Microsoft and Citrix grabbing the second and third positions, respectively. In addition, the Microsoft's Hyper-V and Citrix's XenServer are much cheaper and equally good in quality as VMware. Gartner ranking has also revealed that Oracle, Parallels and Red hat are the niche player in this domain.

The chief analyst Thomas Brittan said that, “Citrix and Microsoft have joined VMware in the Leaders Quadrant by increasing vision and execution respectively.” He further added, “Although market share leader VMware continues to set the standard in products and the pace in terms of strategy, Microsoft has increased its market share (especially among midmarket customers new to virtualization), and Citrix is leveraging its desktop virtualization strengths and its free XenServer offering to expand its server virtualization share.”

An analyst firm, The Burtron group which was hired by Gartner had previously pointed out the limitations of Microsoft's Hyper-V and had called it out as the recipe to disaster. Despite the latest listing, VMware still brags about its robust management software. Microsoft has added features like live migration and memory oversubscription to lure the customers. The Burton group had declared beforehand about the Citrix's XenServer, which is meeting all the security and virtualization requirements. Therefore, they had analyzed that the XenServer product was ready to be launched.

However, in 2010, Gartner said that Microsoft is in its infancy and has “limited innovation and reactive strategy in a rapidly evolving market.” Therefore, it would take Microsoft some more time to innovate and develop a better product.

In the same report of 2010, Gartner had considered Citrix next to VMware. As the things have changed drastically, in the last week report by magic Quadrant, Gartner said, “At the hypervisor and basic administration level, Microsoft has closed most of its technology gaps with market leader VMware (which tends to have an advantage with higher-level management and automation tools). The most significant hypervisor difference continues to be Microsoft's reliance on a parent operating system on each virtualization host -- which carries the benefit of a proven driver architecture, but the burden of potentially more planned downtime for patching and maintenance.”

In the meantime, Citrix has utilized this opportunity to grow its expanse in the self-virtualization market. Unfortunately, Citrix hasn’t been successful in converting its users of the free version of XenServer to free-based edition. Microsoft and VMware have already clashed at the annual VMworld conference and the support of Gartner will surely act as a fuel to their rivalry.