The growing adoption of virtualization in the enterprise has led to the formation of VMware user groups across Australia.

User groups in NSW, Queensland and Victoria are in the planning stage while Perth is having its inaugural meeting on August 31, 2006.

VMware is expected to announce within two weeks the date of its first customer conference to be held in Australia.

Paul Harapin, VMware A/NZ managing director, said local interest in virtualization technology is so strong customers "contact us constantly".

Harapin said adoption rates have been high and as a result virtualization maturity in Australia is on par with the US.

A little over a year ago VMware had three staff in Australia, Harapin said, and numbers have increased ten-fold since then.

Initially, the driver for organizations was cost reduction as virtualization lets companies generate large data centre savings and applications can go into production in minutes, rather than days.

"Virtualization is no longer just about consolidating servers although it allows organizations to buy 10 servers instead of 100," Harapin said.

"Typically, every 15 servers can be reduced to one and there are huge savings in server management costs of as high as 80 percent.

"But virtualization today is becoming a disaster recovery solution, [because] CIOs want higher availability and uptime."