The company used PowerConvert from PlateSpin to analyze which applications could work over a latent link and eliminate which applications could and could not be hosted on a latent link. Data was migrated onto two existing VMware ESX 2.5 servers in Melbourne.

Neil Brindley, senior Windows system engineer with AXA Tech Asia Pacific, said the project began as a "conceptualized" idea.

Brindley said there were even issues trying to find like-for-like hardware in Melbourne before they decided on virtualizing the entire process.

"Because we knew we had to go to new hardware, we tried to source like for like and more or less came to a dead end; we knew we had to bring servers across and the only way to do that was virtualize the systems first.

"Once virtualized, for all systems running Windows 2000 Server or Server 2003, a combination of custom scripts and Sysprep was used to migrate the data to the new hardware."