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The state government of South Australia is establishing a commission to explore how the state can maximise the benefits of the AI boom whilst minimising unwanted impacts (paraphrased, see full announcement here). In local parlance, this type of formal investigation is called a Royal Commission. Although Royal Commissions have a tendency to be backward-looking, that is not always the case. And not here. To quote: "...it is intended that the commission seeks to propose policy solutions, rather than look retrospectively into issues from a judicial or legal perspective." In fact, as noted in the announcement, this style of Royal Commission has precedent—and we believe South Australia should be rewarded for the degree of forethought; the next generation will be born into a world that will bear only accidental or nostalgic resemblance to today's. Too few are giving it due attention and/or are relying relying on technology vendors to self-regulate and dictate policy. This time, those who remember the past may be condemned to a future where they become irrelevant - Subverting George Santayana For the most part, AI has only impacted developers, researchers and knowledge workers...so far. Stay tuned for an upcoming synthesis of academic research into how the risk of displacement will impact wages and employment volumes (hint: the risk is uneven but almost universally detrimental to wages and/or employment volumes; the flow-on is that the displaced rush to lower risk opportunities). Before 2040, "AI" will have fundamentally changed key facets of society as we know them today ranging from education to employment, from defence to scientific research and—ideally—how we close the gap to the technologically disenfranchised (including the elderly and the disabled). And that's just a sliver of what's coming. It's essential that society begins to meticulously examine both the benefits and the risks. The best of us will take this path, in the process becoming "apocaloptimists". Everyone else will be left behind. Bravo South Australia for endeavouring to find the questions that we will all need to ask.

Disclosure: the following is offered purely for informational purposes. It is 100% independent analysis without any form of remuneration. SUSE is not a client of Virtified...and it wouldn't matter if they were. Our research and insights are self-funded and 100% independent of vendor influence. After travelling to Mumbai, Geeko^ came to Sydney on 11 August 2026...with plans to visit Melbourne two days later. Hello Asia These locations are a long way from Europe, where SUSE is more commonplace and generally better-known. And this is part of their challenge. Success in Asia will continue to be a function of SUSE's commitment to the region, which is currently insufficient. The example that demonstrates the current situation for SUSE was the relatively small number of attendees in Sydney (sub-100). With that said, there were some good local customer references (including Aussie Broadband and iag participating in a panel discussion). Getting customers to get up on stage is becoming a greater challenge so we'll just say that several other local customers were awarded for their efforts but we'll keep their names confidential. Additionally, by way of geographic balance, SUSE's private ownership will appeal to those wishing to reduce their dependence on US technology companies. Offerings From a technology and product perspective, SUSE hit most of the key topics for modern infrastructure (from AI and edge to containers and virtual machines). In fact, the keynote drifted toward being a productfest (SUSE Linux Micro, SUSE Industrial Edge, Rancher, AI factory and more). Several sessions, not surprisingly, focused on VMware migration. Two customers, a telco and an MSP, shared their migration experiences. As examples of early migration, they are a promising sign for SUSE Virtualisation...but Virtified notes neither was a classic enterprise environment with all the inherent variation and complexity. In fact, the majority of reference customers had a standardised estate (examples: auto manufacturer, telco, digital bank). SUSE's proposition for enterprise infrastructure is better suited to modern infrastructure rather than legacy virtual environments Virtified would therefore advise that SUSE is currently a stronger fit for new projects rather than legacy migration. Likely candidates would be custom containerised apps, edge and inference (AI). Look for production examples at your scale and level of complexity. Ticking compliance boxes Given their European heritage, it wasn't a surprise to see SUSE's strengths in compliance (including sovereign). Virtified has previously applauded SUSE's investments in this space, including SLES Designated as a Digital Public Good. Likewise, participation in industry initiatives such as margo show an understanding of enterprise technology requirements (both IT and OT). Common Criteria certification adds further strength as does hardening guidelines published by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). Bottom line Customers want choice...and those in Asia are no different. Ultimately, enterprises in Asia would benefit from higher levels of investment from SUSE. ^ Geeko is the name of SUSE's chameleon mascot

Editor: unchanged snippets from a recent Proxmox post. See disclosures at bottom. We are excited to announce the first release of Proxmox Virtual Environment with official support for a second CPU architecture: 64-bit ARM (arm64/aarch64). Read the full announcement in the Proxmox forms here. Until now, Proxmox VE was available for x86-64 (amd64) only. Proxmox VE 9.2 for arm64 shares the code base, package repositories, and release lifecycle with its x86-64 counterpart. It is built on Debian 13.5 "Trixie" with Linux kernel 7.0 as the stable default, and ships the same versions of our underlying key technologies, including QEMU 11.0, LXC 7.0, and ZFS 2.4. Configuration, tooling, and documentation are identical to x86-64, except for a small set of architecture-specific differences listed below. Platform support Fully supported on the NVIDIA Grace Hopper and NVIDIA Vera platforms Best-effort support on other UEFI-based ARMv9-A or newer hardware (ARMv8-A generally works as well, likewise best-effort) The host must boot through UEFI and describe its hardware through ACPI Device-tree-only single-board computers, such as the Raspberry Pi, are not supported All opinions and recommendations are those of the author (not Virtified). We choose what to share purely based on its merit and recieve zero compensation. We make no representation or warranty of any kind regarding its accuracy, validity, or completeness. Any action you take based upon the information is strictly at your own risk. Virtified will not be liable for any losses or damages arising from your use of, or reliance on, this content.

In a world of Wall- Street-driven fixation with shareholder returns, it's pleasant to stumble upon a smidgen of corporate social responsibility. Namely that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) has been verified as a Digital Public Good. SUSE claims to be the first and only commercial Linux product to receive this recognition from the Digital Public Goods Alliance Virtified's take: bravo SUSE. Let's hope this catches on. Read the full announcement here. View the gritty details here.

Editors note: Virtified cannot cover every topic nor do we plan to. As such, we share published articles from trusted sources and with full attribution. See bottom for disclosures. By Stephen Dickens (Hyperframe Research) IBM missed Q2 revenue estimates, largely because enterprise customers are rapidly shifting their budgets. Buyers are prioritizing core AI infrastructure, servers, and memory over traditional software and consulting engagements. Before we go any further, though, we need to highlight a blindingly obvious fact: Mainframe revenue is cyclical. Read the full article at https://hyperframeresearch.com/2026/07/22/mainframe-revenue-is-cyclical-now-everyone-calm-down/ All opinions and recommendations are those of the author (not Virtified). We make no representation or warranty of any kind regarding its accuracy, validity, or completeness. Any action you take based upon the information is strictly at your own risk. Virtified will not be liable for any losses or damages arising from your use of, or reliance on, this content.

Editor's notes: See disclosures at bottom Expect a separate, broader analysis of today's IBM because this got too long. It can be easy to dismiss IBM. Perhaps too easy. My humorous example is one of my teenagers once asking "Dad, what's IBM?" to which I replied "Why do you ask?" Their answer: "I heard it mentioned in Fight Club". I suspect this is the typical low level of knowledge of IBM among the potential next generation of tech workers. For those in the industry, it's probably the mainframe or one of the high profile failures of IBM Global Services (example: #CensusFail) or a nervous laugh when talking to an ex-IBMer^ about the company. The event IBM Think Singapore took place on 21st July 2026. It appears to be one of three such IBM events across Asia in 2026 along with Mumbai and Tokyo (invite only, for what that means). The good Customer participation: A diverse range of modern and traditional enterprises onstage sharing their experiences, including Grab, Ventia, KPJ Healthcare, Keppel and Trust Bank. In Virtified's experience, vested interests often underpin the willingness of customers to participate in such events such that they should be taken 'with a grain of salt'. Nonetheless, their stories painted IBM as a strategic partner. Heritage, legacy and reinvigoration: As a rule, IBM knows its customers very well. Most are large, conservative and slow—and on many occasions IBM can seem the same. Thirty years ago, IBM was the indisputable home of tenured IT professionals and experienced senior management. That was not always the case as recently as five years ago—but it's changing again and for the better. Senior leadership is returning to those halcyon days but with experience that comes from both inside and outside the organisation. Under CEO Arvind Krishna there's an undeniable rising enthusiasm and humility. Don't get me wrong, IBM needs to reduce complexity, increase its relevance and expand its ability to serve midsize organisations beyond big banks and government agencies. The not-so-good Lack of partners: Despite the rhetoric about the importance of partners, I noted very few partner booths (less than 10). This will be something to watch if IBM is going to succeed in its plan to expand reach and relevance beyond the global 2000. Early morning Singapore skyline with cloud (my photo, stylised) The research insights Open source: Of most relevance to Virtified, representatives of IBM senior leadership acknowledged they are comfortable with their open source offerings being commercial open source software—with all the implications therein. It may be subtle to some (it's all free isn't it?) but in reality it poses significant challenges for avoiding lock-in. Oh the irony. The core targets are classic IBM (large enterprise) customers who—rightly—prioritise technical support over ideology. However, open source will also be an increasing point of friction for sovereign requirements particularly (but not exclusively) in Europe. SUSE's demonstrated commitment provides an example of what to consider (see SLES Designated as a Digital Public Good). Strategic impact: Low today (use it or don't) to high in the long term (as an antidote to aggressive price hikes from proprietary software vendors). Scope: all users of IBM open source offerings including Red Hat and Hashicorp. LinuxONE: Linux at scale (IBM estimates equal to between 2,000 and 3,000 x86 cores). Suitability: Large-scale consolidated 'build not buy' Linux environments requiring high availability. Commercial Linux support includes SUSE and Ubuntu (as well as Red Hat). Other options include Alpine. Note: I knew almost nothing about it...and didn't think it was anything more than Linux-on-the-mainframe. Quantum: It's far from my day-to-day coverage but worth noting you can buy a 156 qubit quantum server from IBM today (heading toward 2,000+ logical qubits around 2033, according to their roadmap ). They are likely to be hosted by IBM but they can be installed on-prem if you have access to cryogenic cooling. Observation: Quantum is here. Recommendation: Get ready. Ensure you are protecting your existing information assets against harvesting now for the inevitable "Q-Day" (with some estimates suggesting as early as 2029). Quantum sidenote: Will "Q-Day" be the next Y2K? Other Apptio remains a high-value IBM offering that fits with their strengths—and helps address the perennial enterprise challenge of running IT like a business. I'm still not entirely sure how IBM Consulting differs from Kyndryl. Both espouse a vendor-agnostic approach but my interpretation is that Kyndryl operates in the classic integrator / outsourcer role whereas IBM Consulting is in the role of strategic engagement, ideation / prototyping and customer enablement. Disclosures: Virtified travelled to the event at the invite of IBM. Travel and living expenses were paid for by IBM, which is common industry practice. In fact, I note that several of my former colleagues were sitting comfortably at the front end of the plane (whereas I was definitely down the back!) No revenue was offered or obtained in the publication of this research. IBM is not a client of Virtified. As always, it wouldn't matter if they were. Our research independently covers organisational use of technology and associated trends. IBM were not offered the chance to review this research prior to publishing. Formally-published Virtified research does undergo vendor fact review prior to publishing, which is also common industry practice. Note to self: standardise the above blurbage. ^ I joined IBM in 1997 to continue working with Tivoli, which I had implemented as a customer. I worked in IBM Software through 2001 in both technical pre-sales and, later, Tivoli professional services (TPS)...ultimately entering first-line management of the local TPS team.

Today's tech conferences are a dangerous place. Vendor booths—spanning from has-beens to wannabes—attempt to lure attendees with everything from socks to games to LEGO. In exchange, you become a marketing lead and target for their AI pitch and how they stand at the forefront of the AI revolution. But any seasoned IT professional can smell that BS from a mile away. It's almost always raining in Sydney when there's a cloud conference Enter Google Cloud Summit Sydney 2026. With some notable exceptions—particularly in retail—Google Cloud had a tough fight competing against AWS and Azure to win medium and large enterprises during the last decade. There were many reasons for this (maturity/fit being at the top of this list). What's changing? Customer growth. For many years, and for good reasons, I was a tough critic. However, as we enter the AI era, the battleground is changing. The enterprise IT market is starting to come to Google. The proof is in the financial results (approximately 45% YoY growth in 2025). Why? Google is known for its strengths in data and analytics but it struggled against the IaaS-centric AWS juggernaut and Microsoft's reach. Today, along with Google's other AI assets, Gemini is transforming GCP into a more cohesive and attractive proposition. It's a modern (open) stack that focuses on information and insight rather than infrastructure for legacy workloads. One of the most notable takeaways from the event, for me, was the expanding set of enterprise customers up on stage. Alongside retailers such as Bunnings, K-Mart and Woolworths were IAG, Transurban and Macquarie Bank. "Do your research" Nobody is perfect...but when you operate at hyperscaler you need to be. In this light, who will forget Bard's awkward missteps or questionable Gemini demos that came at almost exactly the wrong moment for Google? In soccer parlance^, these were 'own goals' that distracted many from what has always been one of Google's strengths. If you want to understand the depth of AI expertise within Google then I recommend watching The Thinking Game, which introduces the viewer to Demis Hassabis and takes you inside the origins of DeepMind (seemingly available on YouTube and the link to the trailer is here). ^ It is World Cup time, after all Disclosure: Google is not a client of Virtified...and it wouldn't matter if they were. Our research and insights are self-funded and 100% independent of vendor influence.

The Virtified Loop for Azure Local 2605 has published and concludes that Azure Local is not yet a suitable candidate for traditional data centre requirements. You, unfortunately, will have to decide if it ever will be. Evidence for and against its longevity is mixed (10-year investment but limited uptake and zealous promotion of public Azure). Likewise, Windows Server seems a low priority despite occassional comments to the contrary. Some key points: Only the hyperconverged deployment method has an established track record. Disaggregated, Microsoft 365 Local and disconnected operations are either too new (available only since 1H26) or restricted (disconnected operations requires Microsoft approval). A six-month support window on new releases adds further strain, compounded by declining customer sentiment on Microsoft support and rising concern over pricing complexity. Virtified scores it at 6 against Microsoft's provider score of 8. Windows Server 2025 still seems a stronger technical choice for the data centre use case but suffers from antiquated management tools (read its Loop here). For Microsoft requirements, we recommend prioritising Azure for new workloads—as would they. Proceed cautiously and scrutinise support and licensing before considering Azure Local for existing data centre workloads. Read the full Loop here (no paywall, marketingwall, tracking, cookies or any other restriction). Spread the word!

By Simon Sharwood The roots of the dispute are a January 2021 contract that saw Tesco acquire perpetual licenses for VMware's vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation products, plus Tanzu subscriptions. Read the full story here.

By Joab Jackson The AI bills at Netflix may not be so eye-popping thanks to company senior engineer Tejas Chopra, who has created software to prune agent instructions, as measured in tokens, before they hit the LLM. Read the entire article from El Reg here.

By Bob Glithero, Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager, Portworx by Everpure Brief summary below. Read the full article here. To help measure [VM-centric] operational characteristics, we developed the KubeVirt Performance Benchmarking Toolkit (virtbench), an open-source CLI framework for executing reproducible stress tests across KubeVirt-enabled clusters, including KubeVirt on OpenShift and other environments using CSI-compatible storage. Scenario What It Tests DataSource VM Provisioning Storage cloning efficiency and volume creation times Single Node Boot Storm Node-level capacity under simultaneous VM power-on Multi-Node Boot Storm Cluster-wide startup performance; simulates post-outage recovery Live Migration VM migration stun time; supports sequential and parallel runs Chaos Benchmark Concurrent chaos operations (create, resize, clone, restart, snapshot) Failure and Recovery HA validation via Fence Agents Remediation; measures time-to-recovery

At long last Microsoft has announced that Azure Local expands to sovereign-scale infrastructure with disaggregated deployments. Given how many times their on-premises cloudy offerings change names, hopefully we'll get a shorter name than "disconnected operations for Azure Local" (doAL). General availability is long overdue and has the potential to help close the gap to Nutanix, Red Hat and VMware (among others). Key use cases are likely to include: Remote locations: This deployment allows organisations to run workloads and utilise Azure Arc services without relying on active internet connectivity. Because network latency and reliability are frequent showstoppers for cloud adoption, this is a major win for sizable edge environments. Is it overkill for small remote locations? Yes. Why? doAL has a minimum of 3 nodes each requiring 512 GB memory, 24 cores and 8 that must be at least 2TB each. This beefy hardware footprint underscores the ongoing market need for traditional Windows Server deployments or non-Microsoft alternatives ( Linux ). High control / compliance: This addresses regulated industries, legislative mandates, high control and (some) sovereign infrastructure requirements. Virtified groups these together, and avoids buzzwords along the way, because they are effectively variations on the same theme...regardless of what most vendor marketing would have you believe. For the sovereign use case, digital public goods such as SUSE will tick more boxes (outside USA). Next-generation workloads: This includes emerging distributed, private, and local AI architecture—which is more accurately termed inference. The notable exception, for now, is bundled containers and native Kubernetes capabilities. No doubt this will be resolved before long, given that this functionality has been available from Microsoft elsewhere. Connected versus disconnected (source: Microsoft) Supported Azure services The offering supports these Azure services. It doesn't need to support all of Public Azure but it needs to deliver key management and reliable capability in a secure manner. From a management perspective, doAL includes Azure portal, Azure Arc, Azure Portal, Azure PowerShell and Azure Resource Manager (ARM). Of most note is Azure Local VMs. Notably absent at announcement was 'Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) enabled by Arc for Azure Local', which is in preview (hence not considered by Virtified as being ready). In coming weeks, Virtified will publish a Virtified Loop that evaluates disconnected operations for Azure Local. We will explore the gamut of inclusions and exclusions in detail. Pricing and licensing Although $10 / core / month sounds appealing it's all the add-ons that will hurt (Azure Arc: $6 / server / month; Microsoft Defender for Servers $4.90 - $14.60 / server / month). Note: above prices are Central US region. Azure hybrid benefit may be a licensing option and you'll need a Microsoft Customer Agreement for enterprise (MCA-E). After that, you will need to fill in a form and meet one of the following criteria (or similar in the discretion of Microsoft):  zero / limited connectivity to the internet, "sovereign requirements", strict regulations or restrictions prohibiting sending any kind of data back to the cloud. As with most Microsoft products and services, pricing remains a mystery beyond the capability of Virtified. Seek expert Microsoft licensing advice. Always. Note: Don't forget hardware.