According to Edwin Yuen, director for virtualisation and cloud strategy at Microsoft, the City of Barcelona first decided to adopt Windows Server in order to accelerate its upgrade to Windows 7. In the end, however, the organisation decided to skip Windows 7 and go straight to Windows 8.

Using , the City of Barcelona claims it will be able to save six months of deployment time as it upgrades 2,500 users to Windows 8, equating to roughly 100,000 (£80,325) in savings.

The organisation is beginning with a pilot involving 200 users, and expects to expand this to 1,000 users in the next few months. The migration of the final 1,500 users is expected to be completed over four years.

All the Windows Server 2012 productivity services (including Microsoft Lync, Sharepoint and Exchange) will be implemented using Hyper-V, and Windows Server 2012 will also enable employees to use graphic-intensive applications that were previously difficult to access.

"Even on local desktops, without the horsepower and the large graphics card, operations (involving) manipulation (of) graphics could take a long time," said Yuen. "With the new RemoteFX and RDP technologies that are available within Windows Server 2012, they can actually get better application performance when using a VDI system."