Gartner’s magic quadrant for the virtualization market shows that VMware is once again way out in front, while the likes of Citrix and Red Hat have been left trailing in its wake as “niche players”.

This year there’s only two companies sitting in the leader’s quadrant – that’s VMware of course, and Microsoft. In the challenger’s quadrant there’s just one – that would be Oracle, which is only just ahead of the niche player’s box. It’s followed by Parallels, Citrix, Red Hat and Huawei, whom Gartner considers to be the only major players in virtualization.

It’s fair to say that VMware has the virtualization market pretty well sewn up. So dominant is it, that the only real threat to its empire is a new technology called containers that’s being pushed by the likes of Docker, Google and the Kubernetes open-source group.

Image credit: Gartner

An interesting tweet from Veeam Russia shows how virtualization firms have been jostling for position within Gartner’s magic quadrant over the last five years and the data is quite revealing. It shows how Microsoft in particular has made slow but steady progress as it strives to catch up with VMware. It also charts the rise and fall of Citrix, briefly into the leader’s quadrant in 2011 before slumping back to the visionaries, and now niche player’s quadrant this year.

Gartner’s Quadrant x86 виртуализации 2014. Смотрим, что изменилось за пять лет. http://t.co/IMxkToq2qe pic.twitter.com/8X3FIN7WzM

— Veeam Russia (@Veeam_ru) July 15, 2014

“Citrix is no longer investing strictly to keep up with market leaders VMware and Microsoft for traditional server virtualisation,” notes Gartner’s analysts. “Instead, Citrix is focusing its energies on making XenServer an attractive hypervisor for two markets: cloud infrastructure (optimising integration with its own CloudPlatform offering), and desktop virtualisation.”

Also interesting is the slow rise of Oracle, which has finally managed to haul itself out of the niche players box after several years. It first became a “challenger” in 2012, strengthened its position in 2013, before slumping again this year. By next year it could well find itself back in the niche player’s box.

Going forward, the future battle looks set to be between virtualization and containers, with the Kubernetes alliance poised to give VMware its first real challenge. Containerization’s big advantage is it uses less computer resources, making it much more efficient at scale, although security remains something of an issue. Nevertheless, with Kubernetes having won the support of heavyweights like Google, Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, CoreOS and Docker, among others, it’s reasonable to assume that VMware must be glancing nervously over its shoulder.