ACMA's original roadmap set out in CIO Carsten Larsen's business transformation program was to standardise on Microsoft's Hyper-V, but XenServer came out on top following evaluation. Deputy CIO, Karl Maftoum, joined ACMA in April to spearhead the private cloud project, which is a cornerstone of the change program.

"I did the implementation of XenServer and it is extremely good value for money for us and it had the credentials in the hypervisor space," Maftoum said. "The issue we had with ESX was the price. It is a good product, but in terms of value for money XenServer was the price point we were looking for."

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XenServer beat out Hyper-V on price and suitability. The project kicked off in May and the software and hardware was complete by mid-June. ACMA engaged with Citrix for the migration and the bulk of the virtual machines were completed by mid-August.

ACMA's private cloud consists of 88 virtual machines running across six high-end, quad-core Dell servers. The agency uses about 55 virtual machines in production and 33 for testing.