Virtual desktop reality: City of Cockburn's fleet of 200

Jenna Pitcher
Wednesday, 30 June 2010 11:30

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

The City of Cockburn appears to be the first Australian Government organisation to undertake a roll-out of virtualised desktops across a whole organisation. It recently replaced 200 desktop PCs with 200 VMware View 4.0 desktops and end client machines spanning across 15 different sites across the City of Cockburn '” libraries, community centres and offices.

Last week Delimiter spoke to the men behind the roll out '” City of Cockburn's Jeff Jones, manager of information services, and Justin Rowling, information technology coordinator. There were several reasons on Jones' and Rowling's list that made them take the path of a major IT system overhaul.

'For the last 3 years our satisfaction survey between IT and the rest of the out-stations have been pretty poor,' says Jones. 'So we were trying to look at something that would enable us to manage these people as if they were in this building and get the same type of support.'

He added that having a virtual desktop meant that the support teams didn't have to go on-site to provide support tasks. 'One of the other keys in actually pursuing it was the PC over IP technology actually enabled us to provide a desktop experience equivalent to a PC,' says Rowling.

The City of Cockburn's IT crowd had originally had another option in mind last year as the team was looking at the easy way option of just installing more PCs across the city '” virtualisation wasn't at the forefront of their thinking.