This week Ubuntu sponsor company Canonical released the results of its latest Ubuntu Server User Survey. Over 6,000 Ubuntu Server users from around the world responded. Possibly the most interesting result is that although VMware still leads, Red Hat’s KVM has overtaken the Citrix backed Xen as the most common host environment for virtualized Ubuntu Server instances. According to the report, this is the fist time in the three years that Canonical has been conducting this survey that KVM has beat out Xen.

Another result is the breakdown of the hardware Ubuntu Server is running. Nearly 40% of respondents run Ubuntu Server on towers/desktops, which surprised me. Dell, HP and Intel lead the pack in server hardware:

The biggest users of Ubuntu Server are technology services providers, and most of the respondents were in Europe:

And those users are using Ubuntu Server for a variety of things. Chief among them, unsurprisingly, is a Web server, but cloud and virtualization are showing some growth:

ServicesAngle

VMware continues to dominate the virtualization market, but it’s very interesting to see Red Hat gaining, especially among service providers. It’s worth remembering that outside the Ubuntu community is likely at least somewhat different  story as Microsoft Hyper-V is a real player. But The rise of KVM is not unlike that of the rise of ngnix, which also trails the dominate player (Apache) but has passed the longtime number two (Microsoft IIS). Now is a time of change in technology, and Red Hat is a player to watch in many arenas.