VMware announced that more than 40 universities in Australia and New Zealand are using VMware virtualization to enhance the online experience of their students. VMware is working with the Council of Australian University Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT) which paves the way for more than 40 member institutions to deliver virtualization solutions at standard and low costs, regardless of a school’s size. CAUDIT members include nearly every university in Australia and New Zealand.

“VMware virtualization opens up countless business and academic possibilities that many of our members could not have imagined just a short while ago,” said Geoffrey Dengate, chair of CAUDIT’s Standing Committee on Procurement. “Using VMware virtualization, member schools are able to provide more innovative and flexible research and learning applications for students and faculty, and at the same time reduce their hardware and administration costs and minimize their impact on the environment.”

To date, more than 75 percent of eligible universities, with a combined enrollment of more than one million students, have begun deploying VMware products. The universities will be running a broad range of applications in their virtualized environments, including data warehouses, email, ERP systems (e.g., Peoplesoft), and guest operating systems.

VMware Delivers Important Classroom and Operational Benefits
The most compelling benefit of virtualization for many CAUDIT members is the time savings for delivering new applications for courses. New application instances can be delivered in hours rather than weeks. Virtualization can also have benefits for research projects. Virtual machines can be created quickly and cheaply for development, testing or production work. This is particularly valuable in cases where the machines are required for short periods.

Virtualization also delivers substantial energy savings, helping universities reduce their carbon footprints. Griffith University in Queensland, for example, is leveraging virtualization to cut power usage in its datacenters by approximately 50 percent. Other strategic benefits of virtualization include reduced IT expenditures and improved disaster-recovery capabilities.

“The significant benefits of virtualized computing along with the tremendous financial flexibility that VMware is providing have made this agreement a big win for CAUDIT members,” said Dengate. “All our schools now have access to powerful computing options that remain out of reach for many institutions that have not yet embraced virtualization.”