This story first appeared on Virtualization.info today.

Last week the authoritative news service of Dow Jones reported that Microsoft Hyper-V now has 24% of the virtualization market share.

The claim comes from Microsoft itself, specifically from Kevin Turner, the company COO, that said:

"We launched our first product in October of this past year. From then till now, we gained 24 points of market share against a very, very formidable competitor."



VMware didn’t provide an official reply to Dow Jones, but answered to the virtualization.info inquiry by saying that there’s no evidence they are aware of to support this statement.

There’s lots of speculation as to whether this is “actually true”. If it is the case this would be a giant leap for Microsoft. Last time somebody checked the reports were pretty different:

• In March 2008 Gartner reported that the Microsoft market share was equal to 7%.
• In October 2008 IDC reported that the Microsoft market share was equal to 23%, but that number was obtained by aggregating the distribution of Hyper-V and Virtual Server