Customer perspective: Jaguar Land Rover and Betfair on why they chose VMware

Betfair's head of architecture believes Amazon will be the best option in the future

VMware customers Jaguar Land Rover and Betfair have told Computing why they have opted for VMware ahead of other vendors to virtualise their infrastructure.

Gordon McMullan, CTO at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), said that the firm's CIO, Jeremy Vincent, created an "anyone, anywhere, any device" strategy in which virtualisation was essential.

"You can't fulfil that strategy in a physical world, it has to be virtualised. We've built a five-year transformation programme. It means we have to take advantage of cloud service providers, as we're not just doing this in the UK, we're doing it globally, meaning that it has to be scalable," he said.

The programme, which kicked off two years ago, means that JLR is in the advanced stages of using VMware in a range of locations.

"We've got a whole programme of work that's looking to virtualise the entire estate. VMware play a critical role in our XP upgrade to Windows 7. We're also making sure that we can upgrade to Windows 8, iOS, Linux, and more," he said.

JLR uses VMware's Horizon Suite, which includes a layered image management solution dubbed Horizon Mirage.

"It gives us the ability to deliver that image with a full background completely seamlessly to the user," McMullan said. "What could have taken a few years now takes us months," he said.

McMullan went on to state that the firm completed a thorough proof of concept, in which JLR looked at Citrix, VMware and Microsoft's Hyper-V solution.

"We found that VMware was the only one that could truly very quickly encapsulate the whole desktop. With Citrix, you had to break down when you're building the image whereas VMware gave us the option to wrap it up and use it as it is, which worked easiest," he said.

Lee James, head of IS architecture and strategy at Betfair, said that as the firm is very development focused, it initially opted for Citrix.

"We have been over the years, and continue to be, a big Citrix house. [The estate] is 11 to 12 years old and as we're really development focused, especially across our development and operations teams, Xen provided us with a great platform to move quickly and cheaply in that space," he said.

James said that as Betfair is now concentrating on delivering end-to-end services to its customers, it opted to move to VMware.

"I had previous experience in VMware, we assessed the marketplace to see the capabilities that were out there that could offer everything in a box such as firewalls, software-defined networks, virtual machines, Oracle databases and to be able to provision that quickly, and we found that VMware offered that capability," he said.

"VMware's suite of products work, they interact. Other vendors, even Amazon to an extent, have a lot of catching up to do in this space - but with their £2bn a year budget they are moving fast. We expect [Amazon] to come to the fore and mature and become a potential option in the future," he added.

JLR's McMullan added that there was "no right or wrong decision" between Microsoft's Hyper-V, Citrix and VMware solutions, stating that they all take the lead as best virtualisation technologies at different points throughout the year.