Microsoft and Citrix have made it to the Gartner's Magic Quadrant as the second and the third leaders in the x 86 virtualization markets though VMware is still numero uno by a large margin. Quite significant as last year the annual Magic Quadrant report placed VMware as the only leader in this space. But things have shifted a little bit as Microsoft's Hyper-V is gaining mid-market clients looking for cheaper alternatives while Citrix's XenServer according to Gartner is successfully leveraging its lead in desktop virtualization to broaden its server reach with the free XenServer offering. But the research firm is also quick to point out that the latter's close virtualization tie-ups with Microsoft could complicate matters with customers. Both companies have gained functionality by making some significant recent improvisations to security and virtualization management tools. Microsoft's live migration and memory oversubscription features have come as welcome additions.

Gartner further predicts that the number of virtualization workloads will grow fivefold by 2015 and cites Oracle virtualization manager, Parallels server virtualization and Red Hat's Kernel based virtual machine which recently spearheaded the Open Virtualization Alliance with strong support from IBM as niche players in the Gartner ranking.