Astute readers may have noticed many of my recent blog posts have touched on VM management. I've been doing research for InformationWeek Reports, investigating the state of vendor offerings, real-world experiences, and new solutions to handle VM sprawl.

I've spent the last few months talking with virt vendors large and small, met with folks who are riding herd on large virtualization farms, and have attempted to deconstruct a number of current problems and issues inherent in managing virtualization hosts and virtualized servers from SMBs up through enterprise implementations.

We surveyed hundreds of IT professionals, interviewed top technologists from established vendors and ambitious startups, and rolled in personal experience from our test lab and operations folks out in the real world.

The quick view? VM sprawl is giving many shops flashbacks to the first round of x86 server sprawl way back at the end of the last century. Big iron folks are chuckling at so-called new problems. Again.

Established enterprise management vendors are still spooling up support and product offerings, major players are just starting to deliver robust management tools, and a handful of innovative new companies have created very slick offerings to address specific gaps in the VM management space.

The biggest surprise? While VMware holds the lion's share of the server virt market, many, many shops expect to be running at least one additional hypervisor platform by the end of 2010. Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, Novell SuSE/Xen, Parallels, Virtual Iron, and a sprinkling of other hosts all surfaced in our survey data and interviews. How are you set for heterogeneous VM management over the next 18 months?

If you're starting to feel a bit twitchy regarding the state of your ESX shop, you're not alone. More than half of our survey respondents admitted to using no formal deployment or management tools when they made the P to V jump. A third of our respondents admitted to having neither formal tools nor a formal plan when they virtualized production servers.

You're not alone.

Click here to hit our analytics site if you're interested in a 23-page read.