InfoWorld Sets Agenda for its Virtualization Executive Forum

As virtualization continues to sweep across the corporate world, InfoWorld steps up to help demystify virtualization by creating the Virtualization Executive Forum. The event will take place on September 25 and 26 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. The forum will cover the gambit by focusing on the benefits of various virtualization approaches, including server, hardware-assisted, storage, application, and desktop virtualization.

The forum's innovative agenda has attracted many of the top experts driving enterprise virtualization in both the business and technology communities, such as: Tony Bishop, Senior Vice President and Director of Product Management for Wachovia Bank, Dr. Jeffrey Jaffe, Chief Technology Office at Novell, and Andi Mann, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. The event has also attracted the top vendors in the virtualization community. Companies such as Novell, EMC, PolyServe, Red Hat, VMware, DataSynapse, Emulex, IBM, and Microsoft are sponsoring the event.

The agenda currently includes the following sessions:

• Virtualization: Navigating Through Transformational Technology - Dr. Jeffrey Jaffe, Novell's Chief Technology Officer, will speak about virtualization on Linux and how it is opening up new possibilities for organizations around the world. With virtualization on Linux, the use of hypervisor and hyperthreading technology, today's technology executive can harness the power of the data center, better utilize computing power throughout the organization and ultimately free up the organization to deliver solutions and applications that truly help drive success. With all of that happening though, there is still uncertainty and a learning curve around this technology.


• System Virtualization Strategies - Which virtualization technology is the right one for the job? This session will examine server virtualization options (hypervisor, paravirtualization, OS virtualization, etc.), surveys the approaches to virtualizing applications and end user desktops, and offers general guidance for technology selection and implementation. Learn how enterprise are putting these technologies to work, the problems they are solving and opportunities they are creating, and what's next on the system virtualization horizon.


• 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.


• Inside Hardware-Assisted Virtualization - In systems of scale, virtualization is baked into the architecture at every level. Virtualization is just as essential in the PC server realm, but the x86 design makes engineering challenging and system overhead high. Here, we'll talk about those challenges, how engineers have overcome them, and how new Intel and AMD CPU technology will change the picture for IT.


• 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.


• Virtualization and Applications: Meeting Enterprise Requirements - Mainframes and Unix systems long ago brought virtualization to mission-critical apps. Can the same be achieved on industry standard servers? This session will address performance, scalability, and high-availability of enterprise applications on virtualized x86 hardware.


• 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.


• Exposing the Intangible Enterprise - The Real World Experience of Virtualization - Weighs the realities of virtualization against the marketing hype. Sharing his analysis of new empirical research, case studies, and in-depth interviews, Mann will examine how, why, and where virtualization is being usefully implemented in the enterprise and where the challenges lie. This session will also review related management issues, including how virtualization affects ITIL disciplines, and present recommendations on how enterprises should approach virtualization projects.


• FromPhysical to Virtual (Part 1: Planning) - The first hour of this two-part 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.


• From Physical to Virtual (Part 2: Deployment) - The concluding hour of this two-part session will address how to successfully complete a P2V migration, tools on the market to help with this, load-balancing and fail-over configurations, pitfalls with clustering, incompatibilities, downtime expectations, fallback planning, and final testing before rollout.


• Roadmap to a Virtualization-Oriented Architecture (VOA) - Designing and implementing a virtualization-oriented architecture can create real business value for visionary organizations today. In this keynote session, Tony Bishop, Chief Product Strategist and Head of Product Management for Wachovia's Corporate Investment Bank Technology Group, will outline the 10 fundamental steps Wachovia is taking to realize business advantage through virtualization, and help you identify and overcome the organizational, cultural, and technical challenges to creating a virtualized, service-oriented infrastructure.


• Virtualization Futures: Trends and Forecasts

Register for the event, here.

Posted by David Marshall on July 26, 2006 05:38 PM