VMware finally published sessions list for this year VMworld conference.
As already anticipated by virtualization.info the event will be particularly interesting for the show of two new products: Workstation 6.0 and ACE 2.0.
But sessions list reveals another 2 products highly expected from customers:
- Virtual Lab Manager
probably the core tier of datacenter automation VMware is building with virtualization, born from the acquisition of Akimbi Systems and its Slingshot solution - VMmark
the company benchmarking system for virtualization platform
Instead there are no traces of next generation P2V Assistant (possibly called VirtualCenter System Image) or the misterious Integrity.
This year virtualization.info will be present at the event.
After 3 years of blogging about this industry segment I’ll be there to meet readers, journalists, customers, integrators and distributors, vendors and everybody else wants to talk about the virtualization market.
I’ll look for all of you!
The whole event is composed by 127 sessions so far, splitted between 6 tracks, but only 44 are presented by VMware speakers.
Emerging topics obviously relates to new products so we find interesting sessions like:
- Workstation 6 and Beyond: Sneak Preview
VMware Workstation 6.0 and future releases will offer groundbreaking new ways to further unleash the power of virtualization. This session offers an in-depth look at key new features in the upcoming release of Workstation 6. In addition, a simple demo highlights some of these features and how they can be effectively utilized in your technical organization. - Virtual Appliance Authoring with VMware ACE
VMware technologies in the ACE, Player and Workstation family provide an exciting new way to distribute software. Virtual appliances are preconfigured virtual machines providing a ready-to-run application or service that operates on any VMware platform with minimal configuration. This session explains what a virtual appliance is, how VMware technologies help create and deploy virtual appliances, and what products, features and technologies are involved. - Extending Your Domain Outside the Corporate Network with VMware ACE
Supporting users outside the corporate network usually means some combination of degraded access for the users, security compromises, or expensive additional equipment. With VMware ACE, you can take advantage of the VPN and directory infrastructure you already have and extend it to users anywhere. Topics of discussion include: the problems managing resources outside the domain without VMware ACE, VMware ACE management and guest networking features, how the combination of ACE, VPN and AD can allow machines anywhere to communicate and act exactly as if they’re part of the internal network, and how these remote VMs can be managed using traditional management software. - Virtual Lab Automation: Automating the Self-Service Setup, Capture and Teardown of Complex, Multi-Machine Software Configurations on a Pool of Shared VMware ESX Server Hosts
This session explains the benefits and key technical requirements of a Virtual Lab Automation (VLA) system built on VMware virtual infrastructure software. Application development and IT organizations are grappling with server sprawl, setup and provisioning overhead, costly system failures, and difficulties reproducing and correcting software defects discovered in remote development facilities, or by outsourcing partners. Virtual Lab Automation substantially mitigates these problems by automating the setup and teardown of complex, multi-machine software configurations on a centralized pool of VMware ESX Servers shared by the application development and QA teams in an enterprise. These operations are performed in a self-service manner by developers and QA engineers, relieving the tedious provisioning burden often shouldered by the IT organization. Attendees will leave the session with a clear understanding of the capabilities and benefits of Virtual Lab Automation. - VMmark: A Scalable Benchmark for Virtualized Systems
This session explains why benchmarking virtual infrastructure is difficult and why it is important for hardware and software evaluation and capacity planning. VMware is working to measure and understand system performance in virtualized datacenters. Virtualized environments are not well measured by traditional benchmarking methodologies, which focus on driving a single workload to full system utilization. An appropriate virtual machine benchmark should employ realistic, diverse workloads and generate an easily understandable metric that scales with the hardware capacity of the underlying system. This session presents VMmark, a viable benchmarking solution, and includes benchmark results from several hardware platforms.
Apart these ones another major theme seems to be Virtual Appliance, confirming VMware is heading to the concept of service virtualization (otherwise called Software as a Service or SaaS).
A last mention for another couple of sessions critical for future development of virtualization industry:
- VMware and Hardware Assist Technology (Intel VT and AMD Pacifica)
Intel and AMD have begun shipping CPU extensions to assist with virtualization. In this session, presenters provide an overview of these microprocessor virtualization extensions – specifically Intel VT and AMD Pacifica – and discuss what capabilities are enabled by each generation of hardware assist. Learn how VMware products are using these new capabilities. - VMware VMI Paravirtualization
Paravirtualization, a process in which a guest operating system is ported to run on a virtualization layer, provides the opportunity to increase guest performance. VMware has proposed the VMI paravirtualization interface for inclusion in the Linux kernel and has an associated hypervisor under development. VMware’s paravirtualization work and its associated performance are compared with that of Xen paravirtualization, which is included in some Linux distributions.
Check the whole sessions list here. Register for VMworld 2006 here.