(ServerWatch) Whether you credit the bad economy or accelerated maturity, virtualization appears to have arrived. So says IDC.

The research firm released a report late last week, tracking virtualization use. Usage was picked over deployments chiefly because nearly all x86 servers are now shipping virtualization-enabled — even more so now that Hyper-V is gold — and mainframes and RISC servers have historically shipped that way, internetnews reported.

IDC also issued the caveat that the methodology is still evolving, as it had only just begun measuring virtualization's presence.

This is not surprising given that although the majority of enterprises have some level of virtualization going on, it would be misleading to assume that enterprise-wide they are in any stage beyond infancy. Yes, a good many of these are beyond the walls of test and dev, however, in the grand scheme of things, only a minute percentage have been virtualized.