Pointless metric?

> According to the box counters at IDC, the number of servers that

> shipped from vendors with server virtualisation hypervisors

> grew by 26.5 per cent in 2008 in Western Europe,

> hitting 358,000 units.

Any server shipped with Red Hat will include a hypervisor, regardless of whether it's going to be used. Similarly, servers will be bought with some random OS that either subsequently hosts, say, VMware or is replaced by something with, say, a Xen hypervisor.

You just can't draw any useful conclusions from that metric.