There is a profusion of sources of data about the deployment of Operating Systems available today, just see the references for the usage share of operating systems for a sample. I’ve always wondered about the accuracy and real world applicability of that data. Thus, I created a small data point in time snapshot of OS distributions thanks to a few anonymous contacts in my network. The following graph shows both Production IT managed and Development Team (DevOps) managed environments that span both physical and virtual environments:
This is a data point as the total aggregate OS instances involved is below 250,000. While the numbers in the graph represent both physical and virtual environments, the Production side was over 85% virtualized and the Development side was over 75% virtualized.
How does this compare to your own internal OS Distributions?
Some of the interesting points that jumped out at me:
- Maybe I’m dating myself here, but I remember when those Windows and Linux proportions used to be flipped…
- Solaris and HPUX are still breathing…thought I think it’s safe to say they are on hospice care
- There was a larger percentage of development running ESX Nested than running HPUX (even when nested ESX is not officially supported by VMware)
- Windows deployments are lower in Development; the sources of these data points were not using Azure as far as I know, I wonder how Azure might impact a graph like this moving forward
- Unsure how to read the significant delta between Solaris deployments on the Production side versus the Development side
Post a comment if you want to compare your environment to the above. Since this is a data point snapshot I haven’t calculated any statistical margin of error…for entertaining discussion only. 🙂
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