Israel Defense Force (IDF), an umbrella name for the country's entire military, has signed a contract with VMware, worth about US$27m, according to a Jewish Business News report.

IDF is consolidating its entire data center infrastructure and moving it to the Negev, a desert in the south of Israel. About 80% of the military's servers are already virtual, but the new contract is expanding its use of the Palo Alto, California-based company's technology beyond its core virtualization platform.

Israel's military is buying the enterprise edition of VMware's vCloud Suite package, according to IDF's own publication Israel Defense.

The package basically includes all infrastructure management functions the company has available. The functionality ranges from application and infrastructure provisioning and monitoring through capacity planning and optimization and much more.

VMware opened its office in Israel several years ago and its revenue there has been growing at an annual rate of 40-50%, its country manager Ra'anan Biber told the Business News.

In an effort to cut operations cost and stimulate economy of the Negev region, IDF is building a massive base in the desert, where it plans to move operations from other high-cost locations around the country, according to the Associated Press.

The military started construction of the base earlier this year and plans to relocate 10,000 soldiers there early next year. They are currently stationed in the Tel Aviv metro.

The project is estimated to cost about $650m.