Rackspace sponsored a study of 245 customers of its managed hosting business and found that 57 percent of their internal infrastructures were virtualized. Of those surveyed, 72 percent said they would host business-critical applications on virtual machines.

In the "of-course you would say that" category, 71 percent of the respondents said they would prefer to host those mission-critical applications on a virtualized platform provided by a managed hosting provider such as RackSpace. Not surprisingly, of those respondents who had not used virtualization yet, 64 percent said they would like to try it with assistance of a hosting provider.

The survey pointed up some surprising results, too. More than 50 percent of respondents said they wouldn't want to share a virtualized physical server with other hosting customers, citing performance and security for their reluctance to share a virtualized environment. Only 13 percent of the respondents said they would have no hesitation sharing a virtualized environment with other customers.

The survey showed not surprisingly that 60 percent of respondents use VMware, 14 percent use Microsoft Virtual Server and 11 percent use the open source Xen hypervisor or the commercially available Xen Enterprise to virtualize their environments.

The highest use of virtualization is for testing and development (37 percent), followed by Web serving applications at 22 percent and application servers at 12 percent.

Rackspace expects to offer virtualization services for its customers that draw off the survey results -- the offering is presently in beta test.