Virtualization Meets LinuxWorld Conference

If you haven't already signed up and registered for this year's LinuxWorld, you better hurry up. Time is running out! Join LinuxWorld Conference and Expo as they celebrate the 15th anniversary of Linux and its amazing evolution from a kernel to industrial-strength corporate applications.

The conference is being held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA, on August 14-17, 2006. And with virtualization being such a hot topic this year, you better believe the conference will be talking about it.

The following tracks look particularly interesting:

Grids: Computing Infrastructure for Today's Applications - Dynamic environments, enabled by various virtualization mechanisms, date back to the early days of mainframe computing. As enterprises increasingly leverage virtualization techniques (IDC is reporting more than 60% growth from last year), IT professionals need to better understand how virtualization and Grid relate to one another. Virtualization is not a complete resource management solution. However, it does provide useful capabilities for isolating operating system environments from each other and allowing them to be moved among different hardware resources. Like Grid, virtualization is a trend that's being driven by economics: Grid infrastructure addresses the operating costs associated with managing multiple IT resource islands within the enterprise, while virtualization allows companies to improve utilization of existing hardware rather than having to overprovision to meet peak demands. This session will present how Grid infrastructure technologies are used to enable effective management of shared resources and address how organizations can create a dynamic IT environment.

Linux Virtualization in the Datacenter - With over 20,000 enterprise customers, VMware has a unique view into how Linux virtualization is being deployed and managed in production datacenters. In this session, we will discuss the variety of virtualization-based solutions that have been implemented using VMware Infrastructure, including server consolidation, business continuity, test and development, and virtual desktops. We will also explore Linux-specific requirements for virtualization platforms and management, and the ways in which paravirtualization and the OS-hypervisor interface can evolve to meet those needs.

Xen: Success Stories for Enterprise Open Source Virtualization - At XenSource we have been working with enterprise users of Xen 3.0 for over a year. Many large enterprise users are beginning to experience the benefits of Xen 3.0 for Linux deployments as a cost effective, very high performance virtualization infrastructure solution. This talk will present some use cases for XenSource's flagship product in the enterprise, based on our experience with Linux users'™ virtualization needs, both in the hypervisor and control and automation tools. We will discuss the key issue of integration with storage virtualization, which enables provisioning of any virtual server on any box, any time, as well as snapshotting and cloning of virtual machines. We will draw on specific use cases and best practice that we have accumulated working with our customers.

Panel: Virtualization and the Next Generation Data Center - Virtualization holds great promise, but many first and second generation proprietary virtualization technologies compound the problem by adding cost and complexity in the form of virtual server sprawl, new management requirements and performance overhead. The latest emerging virtualization technologies are addressing these shortcomings and enabling leading enterprises to take virtualization to the next level, . In 2006, virtualization built on an open source hypervisor and virtualization stack will become a key enabling technology to reduce the complexity and cost involved with managing and operating data centers. This session will look beyond single server partitioning at how innovative organizations are virtualizing numerous applications and environments to make the data center more efficient, flexible and agile while dramatically reducing cost and complexity.

Real World Consolidation Through Server Virtualization - Under-utilized server resources didn't seem like such a big deal until the recent economic slump forced a harder look at technology budgets. Now the focus is on consolidating workloads (applications, servers, etc.) to do more with less. This session will look at a case-study example of real-world scenarios dealing with issues such as server consolidation, disaster recovery, application management and routine task automation and how they help ensure the high availability, high performance and low cost that virtualization promises.

The Coming I/O Crisis - Why Virtualization Technology Needs to Move Beyond Processors and Memory - Current industry efforts rightly focus on both hardware and software based technologies that virtualize processors and memory for the purpose of increasing the utilization of servers, generally deployed in grids or clusters in the Web-tier of the datacenter. The benefits of consolidating servers and simplifying the management of these resources in the near term are obvious, considering the proliferation of low end hardware in the marketplace. However, there is a coming crisis that the industry should be laying the groundwork to address, and that is the often overlooked I/O capacity of datacenter servers.

Xen Technical Insight - SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 - Xen is an open source project that is commoditizing virtualization. The Xen project is supported by Novell and other major hardware and software vendors. The Xen technology is at the core of the new SLES10 offering. This session will preview the Xen virtualization technology. Topics covered will include: (a) Xen 3.0 architecture, (b) Xen technical roadmap and (c) Integration of Xen technology in Novell products. This is an advanced technical session suitable for an experienced audience.

Virtual Infrastructure Deployment Best Practices - The presentation discusses practices around deploying a Virtual Infrastructure. This will include some key items from the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Methodology (VIM) that include a 'best of' from doing virtualization assessments, to architectural design, to deployment and ongoing management. This will include a high level strategy with technical points for each area as well as examples of both success and failure in deployment from real life customers. Managing and scaling the Virtual Infrastructure for successful integration within the enterprise through the development of a VIM Center of Excellence.