InfoWorld is preparing second edition of its virtualization conference for corporate managers. Taking place in San Francisco, February 12th, this year event is reduced to just one day.
Quite all virtualization vendors representatives will attend, including Egenera, Microsoft, Surgient, Virtual Iron, VMware and XenSource. Novell and Red Hat will be there too.
Agenda includes following sessions:
- Report from the Front Lines
Organizations implementing virtualization face both technical and organizational hurdles such as new IT skills requirements, resistant managers and stakeholders, potential software support issues, and a maze of technologies and tools to choose from. Our panel of early adopters share strategies, experiences, and lessons learned. - Virtualization Vendor Crossfire
Intel and AMD x86 platforms may be standardized, but no two x86 system virtualization solutions are alike. In this session, virtualization software vendors take part in a moderated discussion to contrast their approaches to core technologies, hardware acceleration, licensing, deployment, support, acquisition and operating costs, and services from competitors. Attendees will leave the session with concise, direct, and balanced information to guide their investments in virtualization. - Storage Virtualization Strategies
A prerequisite to utility computing, storage virtualization eases the management of heterogeneous storage resources, improves data availability across the enterprise, and creates a foundation for disaster recovery and business continuity. This session will provide an overview of the various approaches to storage virtualization (in-band, out-of-band, array-based, switch-based, host-based), discuss how the technology is evolving, and share how IT organizations are using storage virtualization to manage SANs and NAS more cost-effectively and help their businesses become more agile. - Putting Virtualization to Work for IT
The primary roles for virtualization hitherto have been cross-platform validation in software development and for software evaluation. However, virtualization is rapidly breaking into new areas where it is delivering compelling benefits to IT organizations: server resource utilization, load balancing, software support, demos, and training. This session discusses these uses as well as other specialized contexts in which virtualization can deliver unexpected benefits. - Enterprise Grids, Application Virtualization, and Shared Services
Enterprise grid platforms dynamically provision distributed computing resources to accommodate application workloads on demand, effectively creating a shared, virtualized infrastructure. Grids have brought business-critical agility to financial services companies, and boosted performance and scalability of complex apps in many other verticals. Can they really deliver these benefits to the rest of us? Our panelists share their experiences. - Desktop Virtualization, Present and Future
Virtual desktop solutions are emerging from several fronts including thin-client computing vendors, blade system manufacturers, and application virtualization software providers. The resulting variety of offerings should address a wide range of needs, promising to carry the server-based desktop beyond vertical niches. This panel will address the state of the technology, key differences among approaches, and the potential benefits to the mainstream enterprise. - Better Testing Through Virtualization
Virtualization is widely employed in enterprises to perform software testing using mock lab scenarios. Unfortunately, many sites do not get the full benefit from this approach because they do not design configurations correctly or set up applications properly. This session examines existing software tools and industry best practices for lab-based virtualization. - Virtualization and Applications: Meeting Enterprise Requirements
Mainframes and Unix systems have long employed virtualization to scale and secure mission-critical operations. Can industry standard servers and operating systems, enhanced by virtualization, reasonably meet the high expectations set by big iron? This session will address the specific enterprise roles that virtualization will bring within reach of affordable x86 servers. - From Physical to Virtual: Planning and Deployment
This session will focus on the planning and preparation required to implement datacenter virtualization. We’ll discuss skills requirements, software licensing issues, workload selection, performance and resource utilization metrics, host hardware platform requirements, emulation versus host-based virtualization, storage and networking considerations, and how to successfully complete a P2V migration. A brief presentation will be followed by a panel discussion.
Event price is set to $895 for consultants and $795 for industry representatives (not exactly sure what this means). Register for it here.
The virtualization.info Events Calendar has been updated accordingly.