virtualization.info

As most of our readers know by now, the Virtualization Congress 2008 planned for October in London didn’t take place as planned.

While waiting for a second chance in Europe, our team decided to postpone the first edition by several months and move it to the US.

The result is that the Virtualization Congress 2008 becomes the Virtualization Congress 2009, taking place in Las Vegas, at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino, from May 5 to 7.

There are other three important changes:

First of all, for this first US edition, the event is co-hosted with other two events: the Citrix iForum and the Network World Live!
Along with them, the Virtualization Congress 2009 will benefit the event coordination and logistics that Citrix calls Synergy.
This will give virtualization.info enough resources to deliver the great event that we have planned.

The fact that the Virtualization Congress is under the umbrella of Citrix Synergy doesn’t impact the independence of the event.
virtualization.info is still in charge of the whole agenda and has no constrains.
Citrix will not have any special benefits in terms of exposure during the event.
Every vendor, including the Citrix competitors, are more than welcome as sponsors.
Delegates will be able to attend all the three events if they like, otherwise they are totally free to just attend the Virtualization Congress 2009.

In other words, the Virtualization Congress remains “the independent stage for virtualization technologies”.

Secondarily, the Virtualization Congress 2009 agenda will become much more technical, specifically designed for virtualization architects and engineers.
We ditched the “Reseller Day” planned in Europe, and extended the main agenda up to 2.5 days.
We are working to include in the schedule every possible topic about virtualization, such as:

• Application virtualization & streaming
• Benchmarks
• Cloud computing
• Hosted virtual desktops infrastructures (connection brokering, thin clients, etc.)
• Software development & testing through virtual lab automation
• Storage virtualization
• Technology adoption challenges
• Technology ROI
• Virtual infrastructures maintenance  (operational frameworks, best practices, etc.)
• Virtual machines disaster recovery / high-availability  (backup / restore, hosts synchronization, P2V migrations, etc.)
• Virtual infrastructure security (platforms hardening / patching, intrusion detection, permissions, etc.)
• Virtual infrastructures automation / orchestration
• Virtual infrastructures capacity planning
• Virtual infrastructures design
• Virtual Infrastructures performance monitoring / troubleshooting
• Virtual machines lifecycle management (provisioning, inventory, tracking, etc.) 

The third and most important change in the Virtualization Congress 2009 is that we finally accept session submissions from anybody in the industry. No more sponsored sessions only.

If you are an independent professional or a solution provider that wants to unleash some deep knowledge on stage about the topics above, then you are welcome.
We are looking for unbiased speakers that want to present breakthrough sessions through one the following formats:

• Best practices
• Case history
• Research analysis
• Designing
• Implementing
• Introduction / Overview

We’ll accept submissions until the end of December 2008.

In the first week of January the submitted sessions will be published on virtualization.info and the audience will be able to vote for ones that they like the most.

Submit your sessions here: http://www.virtualizationcongress.com/cfp.htm