"Pretty much the whole agency runs on XenServer, including SharePoint, Exchange and other critical infrastructure. The only things still on physical servers are the applications we can't virtualise," Maftoum said.

The project also included disaster recovery (DR) and the SAN is being used to replicate virtual machines to another XenServer farm in Melbourne.

"Implementing a virtual infrastructure has given us a lot of flexibility so we can now provision servers in minutes rather than weeks," Maftoum said. "We do refer to it as a private cloud -- the 'ACMA cloud'.

"We can deploy services quickly and we are more responsive to internal clients. Now we do everything entirely virtually and it makes our DR strategy extremely straightforward."

The team spent a lot of time using Citrix and third-party migration tools to get the physical-to-virtual (P2V) transfers done correctly.