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TAG: Events and Awards

April 08, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Virtualization is alive and well at ManageFusion 2008

I'm here in Las Vegas at the Mirage Hotel attending this year's Symantec/Altiris ManageFusion Event. It was one year ago at this time that Altiris announced that it was being purchased by Symantec, and if you ask anyone at the show (employee, customer, partner), things have gone extremely well and smooth with the transition. The good news for customers, it looks like Symantec is moving at a fairly fast pace with announcing new products and merging product lines where it makes sense.

At today's keynote session, Steve Morton, VP of Product Management and Strategy at Symantec, once again made keynotes fun and interesting. It's a hard task keeping people's attention during a keynote session, and Morton has this thing down to a science! There is no death by powerpoint, just a fun, informative talk show style presentation that quite simply - works.

Today, Morton spoke with Gregory Bryant, VP at Intel who showed off Intel's vPro technology. vPro looks to have a strong future in the desktop arena for Intel, and the technology will be combined with the dynamic virtual client.

We all know virtualization is a hot topic, and it's becoming a big part of ManageFusion as well. Symantec knows the virtualization market is hot, and they've acquired quite a bit of technology that plays well in this space with their acquisition of Altiris.

A few interesting things at the show that I'll be watching for:

More discussions and breakout sessions around SVS Pro, the Altiris application virtualization product that now incorporates streaming as one of the delivery methods.

Symantec Ghost solution Suite 2.5, which now sounds like Symantec has their own P2V and any to any imaging solution. Using hardware independence imaging, you can create ghost images of one hardware platform and then restore that same image to other hardware platforms or even to virtual machines. I'll be checking that out more tomorrow. Stay tuned.

And of course, if you have Altiris Deployment Solution and the Altiris Server Management Suite, you can deploy VMware ESX Server to bare-metal with an easy and scripted deployment solution and then manage the virtual environment along with your physical servers.

There are going to be plenty of good sessions tomorrow that cover the virtualization space, and I'll be navigating the show room floor as well to try and see what the exhibitors are showing off that meets the virtualization challenges.

Posted by David Marshall on April 8, 2008 11:43 PM

January 30, 2008 | Comments: (0)

InfoWorld's Virtualization Executive Forum days away

IDG's InfoWorld is gearing up for its fifth Virtualization Executive Forum, taking place Monday, February 4th at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco, California.

The executive-level event will explore enterprise commitment to virtualization in order to maximize IT resources for strategic business advantage. The event will also focus on how virtualization fits into the big IT management picture.

Keynote presentations, breakout sessions and panel discussions will offer detailed examples of real-world virtualization efforts from companies including AOL, Credit Suisse, Digital Realty Trust, Kroll Factual Data, Novacoast, T-Systems North America, Virtual Iron, VMware, and more.

Eric Knorr, Editor-in-Chief at InfoWorld will kick off the event and then following that, three great keynote presentations that include:

Beyond Consolidation: Visualizing Our Virtual Future - By David Reilly, Head of Technology Infrastructure Services, Credit Suisse.

Virtualization & IT Management Processes: A Progress Report - By Andi Mann, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates

Server Virtualization: The New Data Center Operating System - By Ed Walsh, President & CEO, Virtual Iron Software

Passes to attend InfoWorld's Virtualization Executive Forum are priced at $1,295, with credential and early registration discounts available. For more information and to register, click here.

Sponsors for the Virtualization forum include Virtual Iron (Cornerstone sponsor), Unisys (Gold sponsor), NEC Corporation of America & MTM Technologies (Silver sponsor), Stratus Technologies and Thinstall (Associate sponsors).

Posted by David Marshall on January 30, 2008 05:12 AM

January 08, 2008 | Comments: (0)

InfoWorld names Technology of the Year awards

IDG's InfoWorld recently announced the recipients of its 2008 Technology of the Year honors, recognizing 45 products across 9 general categories. The selection process was handled by InfoWorld Test Center editors and reviewers.

The annual awards identify the best and most innovative products on the IT landscape and the winners are drawn from all of the products that have gone through the testing process during the past year, with the final selections made by InfoWorld's Test Center staff.

"InfoWorld tests upwards of 200 IT products every year, and we see many, many good ones," said Doug Dineley, InfoWorld's Test Center Executive Editor. "Our Technology of the Year award winners represent not only the cream of the crop, but the best products in the most important product categories. From the top AJAX development tools and SOA middleware to the best blade servers and VoIP systems, these are the products at the leading edge of IT."

The Virtualization Report takes a look at three of the winners from the Platform category. You'll probably recognize the names and products from Symantec (application virtualization), VMware (Windows and Linux desktop virtualization) and Parallels (Mac OS X virtualization). All great virtualization tools and well deserved winners of the award. Other winners in this category included Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Sun Solaris 10.

Symantec SVS Professional 2.1
Symantec's choice of AppStream as its streaming partner make SVS Pro the most complete of the three leading application virtualization platforms. Thanks to the AppStream Web portal, users can surf to and access the desired applications in a kiosk-like, on-demand fashion, outshining both Microsoft SoftGrid and Thinstall in Web-based access to packaged applications. In this regard, SVS Pro provides a solution that is closer to the subscription-based delivery model that's been the holy grail of commercial developers for nearly a decade.

Click here for the full story.

VMware Workstation 6.0
VMware Workstation has long been the standard bearer for desktop virtualization among hard-core users, and version 6.0 solidifies VMware's position as the dominant player in developer and product support circles. A combination of class-leading features, direct hooks into popular IDEs, an ever-expanding roll call of supported operating systems, and excellent scalability make VMware Workstation the only choice for serious virtualization users.

Click here for the full story.

Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac
Parallels Desktop 3.0 brings several new features to the Mac OS X virtualization game, including direct graphics acceleration capabilities, snapshots, and offline browsing of VM file systems. It's an intuitive, easy-to-use virtualization platform for switchers who need to run Windows applications alongside OS X. Convenient, GUI-based tools and a quick Windows install are the product's real strengths. It lacks VMware Fusion's support for 64-bit operating systems and some versions of Linux, but for most users it's the better choice.

Click here for the full story.

You can find out about all of the other great winners of the award, here. It includes categories such as Application Development, Applications and Middleware, Data Management, Hardware, Networking, Security and Storage.

Posted by David Marshall on January 8, 2008 06:15 PM

November 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)

InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum Returns to San Francisco

IDG's InfoWorld Executive Forum returns for the fifth time, and once again takes place in the beautiful Hotel Nikko in San Francisco on Monday, February 4, 2008.

This event is geared toward the executive level, and it offers a real-world guidance and discussion around the best practices for a dynamically managed IT environment. The one-day event will highlight the top sessions from the two-day event that recently took place in New York. In addition, the event staff has added all new keynote presentations and panel discussions covering key virtualization themes from software licensing implications to the skillset and security needed for the technology.

Virtualization industry expert and Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) analyst Andi Mann returns to the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum stage to deliver what promises to be an exciting keynote presentation. A lot has changed in the industry since Mann's first InfoWorld keynote back in 2006. This time, he will discuss the changes in virtualization and IT management that have occurred over the past 12-18 months, present a perspective on the current state of the virtualization space, and provide actionable advice to help you understand and overcome the many challenges in managing a virtual IT environment. I promise you, this is a keynote that you don't want to miss.

Sessions will also include case studies detailing the processes, challenges and results of server, storage and desktop virtualization as well as focused sessions on both virtual server security and the Green IT energy savings achievable through virtualization technologies.

If you haven't made plans yet, I invite you to check out the latest information and agenda on the events Web site, here.

And when you are ready to sign up and register, go here. Register before December 10, 2007 for early bird pricing.

Posted by David Marshall on November 30, 2007 06:59 PM

October 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Citrix Making a lot of Noise at iForum 07

Citrix Systems is holding their 10th annual technology conference - Citrix iForum 07, the App Delivery Expo - here at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.

The show is bringing together the old and the new. Long time Citrix customers may be being exposed to server virtualization for the first time in many cases. Citrix is exposing its end-to-end solutions, showcasing its Presentation Server technology and its newly acquired technology from both Ardence and XenSource.

With over 4,000 people in attendance at the show, Citrix is making a lot of noise - the keynote session started out with a bang! Literally. With an explosion of fire works set off before Citrix's CEO Mark Templeton took the stage, people sat up and took notice.

Mark Templeton highlighted the company's vision and strategy for application delivery. And if you didn't understand where all the pieces and parts fit into a tightly grouped offering and a solid end-to-end strategy before the keynote, you left knowing exactly what Citrix intends on doing for the next few years.

In addition to the NEC partnership announced by XenSource before the Citrix acquisition, Citrix and Dell have since come out with an announced partnership to make server virtualization technology a reality for customers of all sizes on Dell hardware. By offering Citrix XenServer OEM Edition across Dell's PowerEdge server line in the coming year, the companies will bring built-in, easy-to-use virtual machine installation and management to millions of Dell customers worldwide. As part of the agreement, Citrix XenServer will support Dell OpenManage and XenServer OEM Edition and XenServer Enterprise will be tested, qualified and supported by Dell.

Citrix also announced an agreement with HP to qualify and sell Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition on industry-standard HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers. HP and Citrix's expanded relationship provides customers the ability to purchase an entire virtualization solution, from server to software, from HP with the added benefit of interoperability and HP support.

Business Objects, a leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, also spoke on stage and announced its partnership with Citrix Systems to deliver a Crystal Reports Server XI virtual appliance. The new offering is a pre-installed and pre-configured solution that will help reduce deployment time from days to minutes. In addition, for the first time, the two companies are offering customers a chance to instantly evaluate the product through a virtual "test-drive", thus eliminating the cost and complexity typically associated with enterprise software evaluations.

More live demonstrations of Citrix products and technologies are promised for the second keynote.

Posted by David Marshall on October 23, 2007 11:51 AM

September 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)

VMworld Day 3 - Mendel Always Brings It

VMworld may be over, but on the last and final day of the show, VMware's co-founder and Chief Scientist really brought things home as I expected. At last year's conference, I really enjoyed Mendel's discussion - especially the part about VMware's recording feature used to capture the live execution stream of a virtual machine and then the ability to play it back later. This feature currently lives in VMware Workstation but it has so many future use case scenarios in the server virtualization world as well.

Mendel started off the keynote discussing virtualization at a very high-level. He explained what virtualization is and how it works. If I hadn't heard Mendel speak before, I might have been a little nervous at this point - thinking that I just stepped into an introductory course on virtualization and VMware Infrastructure 3 functionality. Don't get me wrong, those things are great, just not what I came to hear from someone like Mendel.

And as expected, he didn't disappoint. Mendel introduced a new form of VMotion to the audience - Storage VMotion. With Storage VMotion, VMware is leaving the CPU executions on the same physical server, and instead, moving the virtual disks from one storage area to another. In essence, it's the opposite of "regular" VMotion which keeps the virtual disks on the same storage location but moves the CPU and memory execution to a new physical host server. The demo worked well as they demonstrated this feature against an Oracle virtual machine.

The next topic covered virtual appliances. Most of us are familiar with the concept as well as the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace. This discussion and demonstration however took virtual appliances to another level by discussing the distribution method. Again, most of us have downloaded a virtual appliance at least one time or another. And no matter how small or large they are in size, it takes a while to download the entire machine. Instead, Mendel showcased a "streaming" distribution of the virtual appliance that allowed for an almost immediate power on of the machine in comparison to a lengthy download of the same machine on another client.

The idea here is to use a recording method to decide which blocks of a virtual machine are needed to be prefetched in order to properly boot the machine in a streaming fashion without downloading the entire appliance. The technology is really interesting and could be extremely important when working in a VDI environment. My question here is how does this compare to what others like Moka5 have been working on for a while now?

And finally, Mendel introduced the idea of high availability to the datacenter. Sure, VI3 already has an HA offering which allows its users to recover a virtual machine when its host fails, but what he demonstrated was a new concept of availability that showed where one virtual machine was being captured and redirected to a second virtual machine in real-time - creating two virtual machines in lockstep with one another. If the primary hardware fails, the secondary virtual machine instantaneously takes over. This was demonstrated with two machines running Exchange Server and LoadSim. Mendel literally "pulled the plug" on the primary server and the secondary VM took over gracefully and continued to operate its 50 simulated users.

Mendel closed by asking for ideas from those in attendance. What are your difficult problem areas?

Thanks to Mendel for showing and discussing the future. Always a pleasure to see what Mendel has to offer at these shows. I was lucky enough to meet with him and speak with him last year.

We're only scratching the surface with what the virtualization layer has to offer. And that my friend is the best part of this!

Posted by David Marshall on September 15, 2007 03:47 PM

September 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

VMworld 2007 Day 2 - Cisco and Exhibit Halls

The second day of VMworld 2007 ended with the same result as the first day... I was exhausted!

I may have been tired from a long day, but a successful day it was. One of the best things about these forums is being able to meet new people. And with well over 10,000 people in attendance, there was no shortage of new people to meet. Along with the new faces, I was happy to see some old friends from conventions past as well as old friends that I have never had the chance to meet face to face with until now.

The morning started off like a bolt of lightning for me, getting to the show early to get a jump on things (who said you could sleep in later when you go to a convention?).

The keynote presentation was given by the Chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, John Chambers.

John predicts a second wave of innovation since the Internet, built on top of virtualization and the power of the network, creating new services and support models that will be driven by consumers.

We keep coming up with new words or numbering systems, and it seems like we are already heading to the Virtual Datacenter 3.0 where all aspects are virtualized. Did we ever complete Virtual Datacenter 2.0? Anyway, all of the infrastructure gets virtualized in this world, servers, storage and networks. I've been waiting for this version of the datacenter world since the early part of 2000. Slow and steady wins the race I suppose.

Moving from talk to action, Cisco then demonstrated for us a corporate portal that makes use of VMware's VirtualCenter APIs to help automatically provision resources as needed. In addition, we saw Cisco's VFrame console, showcasing how additional servers could be deployed and provisioned with VFrame workflows doing the orchestration.

The demo went on, and while interesting, I couldn't help but wonder about what happened to any announcements about virtual switches for ESX Server. It was afterall something that many of us anticipated hearing about - and without it, something seemed to be missing from the keynote.

Other than that, Cisco like many of us find virtualization and green computing a top priority for next year.

Leaving the keynote, the rest of the day was basically spent walking around the exhibit room when I could to find out who was there, what were they showing, and what new companies were popping up onto the radar screen. More on the technologies at a later time. Suffice to say, there was no shortage of interesting products being displayed in the exhibit hall.

And then it is off to Treasure Island for a little entertainment and fun.

Posted by David Marshall on September 12, 2007 10:21 PM

September 11, 2007 | Comments: (0)

VMworld 2007 Day 1 a Virtual Success

If you attended VMworld 2006 in Los Angeles and thought you were surrounded by a large flock of virtualization users, you probably wouldn't have imagined the number of people that descended on the Moscone Center in San Francisco this year.

In my mind, two recent events have defined just how big virtualization has become. Obviously, the first is the not talked about enough IPO of VMware. And the second, the number of VMworld 2007 attendees and exhibition booths. I mean, who is going to argue with a billion dollars made from an IPO and the fact that 11,000 people all gathered around in one place to find out about one topic... not me! Virtualization is definitely more than buzz folks. Climb aboard.

The VMworld conference officially kicked off today for everyone, although many people were in attendance the day before for Technology day and Partner Day, and of course, plenty of virtual fun at any number of bars located around the city. Virtualization engineers know how to have fun.

Kicking the show off, Diane Greene said it best when she said that a year ago, we were talking about virtualization becoming mainstream, now, we're talking about a virtualization industry.

One of the most interesting things was watching Diane and Mark Jarvis, Dell's CMO, introduce us to the embedded VMware (ESX Server 3i - no, it isn't a new BWM) hypervisor.

Similar to last year, the talk continued about virtual desktops, virtual appliances and the green computing initiatives that we keep hearing so much about these days.

Pat Gelsinger, a Senior VP and GM at Intel, took the stage and discussed several virtualization areas of focus such as FlexMigration (helping live migration across processor types), Extended Page Tables and virtual processor IDs.

The Intel talk included a discussion on the Intel VT-d architecture for directed I/O as well as Intel's Virtual Machine Device Queues which reduces CPU utilization on network and storage devices. It then closed with a demo of the Xeon 7300 series processor and showed off some of its benchmarks.

Hector Ruiz, Chairman and CEO of AMD took over and discussed their green computing efforts and the company's energy efficiency which was showcased in the company's datacenter in Austin by reducing power consumption by well over 70%.

The company then discussed their recently announced AMD Quad-core Barcellona chip. The new AMD nested paging technology (AKA Rapid Virtualization Indexing or RVI) was explained - how it increases performance and helps reduce the size of the VMM.

Karthik Rau returned to the stage to end the day's keynote. And then, Day 1 launched into full gear as people scattered for the exhibit hall, breakout sessions and labs. Stay tuned!

Posted by David Marshall on September 11, 2007 11:38 PM

August 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Mastering Virtualization from the Datacenter to the Desktop

InfoWorld's Virtualization Executive Forum is right around the corner. If you haven't signed up or made plans to attend this event, I invite you to do so. Once again, this event is going to take place in the historic Roosevelt Hotel in New York City on September 24th and 25th 2007. I thought last year's event was a huge success, and I certainly enjoyed meeting and speaking with many of you about your problems, issues and successes with this great technology.

This year's event should prove to be even more interesting. If you aren't familiar with the show's format, it is a great place to connect you with leading industry analysts, senior technologists from Fortune 500 companies as well as your peers to help you collaborate on strategies to master virtualization whether in the datacenter or on the desktop.

The event takes place over two days, and in those two days, you will be immersed in presentations, case studies and candid discussions to help you understand how server, storage, desktop, file and application virtualization technologies can be combined to improve deployment cycles, reduce hardware costs, and enhance overall business agility.

To try and pack the most information into a two day period, InfoWorld has revamped the breakout sessions into two distinct tracks:

The Case Studies Track will present the firsthand experiences from end-users addressing benefits gained and lessons learned to help you evaluate which virtualization solutions are the best answer for you.
The Technical Track will feature tried and true guidance from experts outlining the tangible next steps for planning, deploying, managing, and scaling your virtualization initiative.

And to make the event even more interactive than it already was, they've given more time to allow people to interact and collaborate with each other. They've allotted more time throughout the day to ask questions of presenters, share your issues and concerns with others, get answers from the experts, connect with peers, and network with the leading virtualization vendors.

This event just keeps getting better thanks to the feedback of those of you who fill out the questionnaires as well as to the InfoWorld staff who puts on this event throughout the year.

To register and find out more information about the forum, please visit the Web site. And most importantly, go and have a good time while sharing and finding out all you can about this great technology.

Posted by David Marshall on August 12, 2007 06:34 AM

August 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Virtual Iron Named Windows IT Pro Editor's Best for Virtualization

If you play the "first thing that comes to mind" game, and someone asks you to name a virtualization platform, more often than not, someone will yell out VMware or specifically VMware ESX Server.

But this time, Windows IT Pro yelled out Virtual Iron when it was trying to decide on the Editor's Best Choice for the virtualization category.

Here's what Jason Bovberg of Windows IT Pro had to say:

Virtualization is the future of computing, not only for server consolidation but also at the desktop level. If you haven't already begun looking into the technology, you will soon. It's inevitable, whether you're a large corporation looking to tame bloat or a smaller company needing to simplify administration and reduce costs. If you head up a small-to-midsized business (SMB), you've probably turned first toward VMware, probably the most wellknown virtualization platform on the planet. VMware offers all the features you need, but perhaps you've been a bit intimidated by that company's pricing structure. Virtual Iron Software is positioned in the market as a strong VMware competitor—with much of the same functionality at a fraction of the price. Virtual Iron 3.1, my Virtualization Editor's Best choice, the company's enterprise-class virtualization platform, is based on the open-source Xen hypervisor and runs unmodified 32-bit and 64-bit Windows and Linux OSs with near-native performance. Using Virtual Iron's Virtualization Manager, you can control, monitor, modify, and automate virtual resources.
To get a feel for Virtual Iron in the real world, I spoke with Paul Joncas, CEO of Meganet Communications, an ISP/managed services company with 23 employees. Meganet's environment, characterized by many standalone servers, faced mounting space, heat, and power-usage problems. Paul tried various methods to increase efficiency and eventually faced the prospect of virtualization. He told me, "We spoke with three companies, including VMware and Virtual Iron, and we zeroed in on Virtual Iron immediately, for several reasons. First, Virtual Iron offered a lot of the same features as VMware, which was great because we felt that we weren't a big enough fish for VMware. Second, Virtual Iron's pricing was certainly attractive—about $600 or $700, compared with $4000 for VMware—although price wasn't really the determining factor for us. What it really came down to was the eagerness and availability of Virtual Iron's support for even the most minute, seemingly trivial questions. We were about to move into a totally different world, from stand-alone servers to a virtualized environment, so we obviously didn't take this very lightly. Virtual Iron gave us all the attention we needed."

Today, Paul talks enthusiastically about his new streamlined server room: "We're realizing big electricity savings and heat reduction. Over the next six months, we're looking forward to further emptying out our server room and having everything running on the Virtual Iron platform."

You can read their other Editor's Best choices in various categories, here.

Posted by David Marshall on August 4, 2007 08:15 PM

July 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)

TechWorld Announces 2007 Award Winners

With a record breaking number of product entries this year, TechWorld 2007 Award judges once again had the difficult task of choosing a winner in each category from a host of projects.

The award presentation itself was held at the Gibson Hall in central London. Entrants were evaluated on strategy, creativity, innovation and effectiveness. And they were judged by an independent panel of judges made up of respected individuals from within the IT industry and TechWorld editors.

And it seems as though virtualization made a nice showing at the event.

Winning "Storage Virtualization Product of the Year" was DataCore Software with its SANsymphony 6.0 product.
EqualLogic, who has been making the news lately with its PS Series SAN technology being combined with VMware Infrastructure 3, took home the "SAN Product of the Year" award for its EqualLogic PS3800XV.
Long time virtualiation application provider, PlateSpin, took home the award for "Green Product of the Year" for its PowerRecon 3.0 application.
And winning "Virtualization Product of the Year"? It may not come as any surprise - VMware scores with its VI3 virtualization platform.

You can view these and all of the other TechWorld 2007 award winners, here.

Posted by David Marshall on July 4, 2007 07:57 PM

June 11, 2007 | Comments: (0)

PlateSpin Receives Virtualization Technology of the Year Award

In a recent press release, PlateSpin announced that they had won the 2007 "Virtualization Technology of the Year" award as part of The Banker Technology Awards.

The Banker Technology Awards are backed by The Financial Times UK and recognize innovation and excellence in the banking technology space worldwide.

"The Banker Technology Award is one of the most prestigious honors within the financial services industry," said Stephen Pollack, Founder and CEO of PlateSpin Ltd. "This international award is a testament to the uniqueness of our workload profiling and portability technology and the benefits our solutions bring to data centers worldwide. PlateSpin's solutions enable customers to take a unified approach to managing, moving and protecting all workloads in the data center. Within a single technology platform investment, data centers can leverage PlateSpin's workload awareness and anywhere-to-anywhere (X2X) workload migration capabilities to solve critical IT challenges such as server consolidation, hardware migration and disaster recovery."

"As large banks and global financial services organizations work to consolidate space, power, and server resources in the data center, innovative solutions like those provided by PlateSpin are becoming increasing important," said Brian Caplan, Editor, The Banker.

Posted by David Marshall on June 11, 2007 05:37 PM

June 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)

VMware's Second Annual Vanguard Awards

As VMware's annual showcase event approaches (VMworld 2007), the company is once again requesting customers to nominate their organization for the VMware Virtual Vanguard Awards.

Billed as "Win Fame, Glory and a Pass to the Premier Virtualization Conference of the Year", this second annual awards program is meant to honor and recognize customers who use VMware solutions to achieve significant improvements when addressing complex IT problems.

This year, the company is expanding the awards to recognize outstanding achievement in 10 different categories. While the majority of the awards are going to honor VMware customers, this year, VMware has added a category to recognize ISVs who have delivered innovative solutions using VMware's Virtual Appliance technology.

Best Overall Return on Investment (ROI) & Operational Benefits
Most Advanced VMware Implementation
The Virtual Vanguard Award for Innovation
Best Disaster Recovery Solution
Best Enterprise Desktop Solution
Best Development & Testing Solution
Best Infrastructure Optimization Solution
Green Award: Energy Savings
Most Successful Virtual Appliance Deployed by an End User
Most Successful Virtual Appliance Developed by an ISV

Winners in each category will receive a free pass to VMworld 2007. And like last year, a special awards ceremony will take place to honor the winners and present them with their award.

If you are interested, act quickly. All nominations must be submitted by Friday, June 29th at 5 PM PST.

For a submission form or to find out more information about the award, go here.

Good luck! We'll report on the winners after the show.

Posted by David Marshall on June 9, 2007 07:53 AM

June 02, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Windows Server Virtualization at TechEd 2007

If you are one of the 14,000 people expected to attend this year's Microsoft TechEd 2007 event in Orlando, FL next week, you might want to keep your eyes and ears open about various virtualization sessions.

Over at the Windows Server Division Weblog, Patrick writes that Bob Muglia and Jeff Woolsey will demonstrate a Windows Server 2008 server core installation in a build of Windows Server Virtualization managed by MOM and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). Patrick hopes they will demonstrate VM creation, interop and networking load balancing with limited disruption of service, and perhaps even a V2V conversion from VMware ESX Server to Windows Server virtualization. And I'll second Patrick's hope... I too would love to see that.

Here are some other sessions of interest:

SVR239 - Virtualization 360: Microsoft's vision and strategy for virtualization
SVR342 - High Availability for Physical and Virtual Environments with Windows Server 2008
SVR344 - Running Paravirtualized Linux Guests with Microsoft Windows Virtualization
SVR241 - Debunking virtualization market myths and misperceptions
SVR345 - Terminal Services and SoftGrid used together for application delivery
SVR201 - Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services overview

I'm looking forward to the show. And I hope to see many of you there!

Posted by David Marshall on June 2, 2007 07:10 PM

June 02, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Optimizing Your Data Center with Virtualization and Automation

If you haven't heard Simon Crosby, Founder and CTO of XenSource, speak before, you might want to consider signing up for this Webinar. I've heard him speak a few times at various forum events, and each time, I've enjoyed what he had to say and how he presented it.

Simon, along with Rob Gingell, CTO and EVP of Products at Cassatt Corporation, will discuss the advances being made in virtualization and automation and how to use them to make your data center more responsive and more dynamic.

The goal of the Webinar is to cover the following:

How virtualization prevents over-provisioning resources, offering clear, easily quantified economic advantages.
How service-level automation uses shared resource pools to assign and re-assign resources to applications based on the real-time performance of the services they support.
How a combined virtualization and automation solution can maximize flexibility while minimizing the resource expenses for both the software and hardware.

Join them for this 1 hour event scheduled for June 6, 2007 at 9:00 AM Pacific Time.

You can register for the event, here.

Posted by David Marshall on June 2, 2007 06:30 AM

April 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)

View the VMware TSX Nice 2007 Presentations

If you weren't able to attend the VMware TSX 2007 event in Nice, you can at least now view many of the presentations online. VMware has recently added a list of presentations online, available for download. Some of the interesting presentations include:

To download and view the complete list, go here. Remember, knowledge and information is power!

Posted by David Marshall on April 28, 2007 02:55 PM

April 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)

XenSource Publishes Xen Summit 2007 Presentations

XenSource has recently published the presentations made at the Xen Summit of 2007, held in New York this April 17-18, 2007.

Some interesting presentations to note:

Xen Development Roadmap by Keir Fraser and Ian Pratt
Paravirt Ops Update by Jeremy Fitzhardinge

The Xen API by Ewan Mellor

Secure Remote Management with Virtualization by Daniel P. Berrange

High Availability Clustering Using Xen by Yoshi Tamura

Nested Page Table Support by Elsie Wahlig and Wei Huang

Semi-Active Workload Replication and Live Migration with Paravirtual Machines by Daniel Stodden

View all of the online presentations, here.

Posted by David Marshall on April 28, 2007 02:42 PM

April 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)

BladeSystems Insight Hosts Over 300 IT Industry Executives at Debut Event

BladeSystems Insight, a national invitational summit focused on blade-based and other data center solutions, made its successful debut on April 10-12, 2007.

At the event, over 300 participants attended which included senior-level IT executives from across North America, more than 20 leading and emerging vendors, seven industry associations, five separate analyst organizations, and media. The event took place at the Westin resort in Savannah, Georgia.

The three-day agenda culminated with the premiere of the BladeSystems Insight "Insight Awards" where attending executives voted upon outstanding vendor products and presentations showcased at the event.

IBM was awarded Best Server Product, Egenera was awarded Best Virtualization Product and Chris Hipp, technologist and entrepreneur, was presented with a special Outstanding Contribution to Blade Computing Innovation Award.

Other event highlights included a keynote address from IBM executive Mark Papermaster and Intel executive Lorie Wigle, 50 case studies presented by participating vendors and over 500 onsite one-on-one meetings scheduled between executives and vendors as well as private analyst meetings. The show included panels on virtualization and it brought together a panel from the Blade Community that included the presidents of leading industry associations such as Blade Systems Alliance, Blade.org, DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force), Ethernet Alliance and the Open Grid Forum.

BladeSystems Insight 2008 will take place April 27-29, 2008 at the JW Marriott Starr Pass Tuscon Resort & Spa in Tuscon, Arizona. Featured in next year's program will be educational workshops in vertical areas such as virtualization, power and cooling, networking, storage, and other data center technology sectors.

For more information, go here.

Posted by David Marshall on April 25, 2007 06:37 PM

March 14, 2007 | Comments: (0)

XenSource Kicks-Off Global Seminar Series

XenSource announced a new global campaign titled "Simply Virtualize" which includes a webcast and a series of global events which the company is producing along with IBM and Intel.

Are you interested in reducing IT capital expenditures and facilities costs such as power, cooling and real estate? Who isn't!

In this seminar series, Intel, IBM and XenSource are attempting to help the global community. Advances in hardware and software virtualization, as well as integrated technology solutions such as the IBM System x server bundled with the XenEnterprise solution, have removed common barriers to server consolidation such as cost and complexity.

In this Webcast, you will hear an analyst's perspective on why now is the time to leverage virtualization for server consolidation. If you attend a seminar in one of the cities near you, you will get a more detailed look at how this next generation virtualization supporting both Windows and Linux can dramatically reduce your IT costs while increasing business agility and IT responsiveness.

In his presentation, Gillett will cover the benefits of server consolidation, findings from a recent virtualization adoption study conducted by Forrester, and how companies can get started today. In addition, executives from Intel and XenSource will present in the webcast. The seminar series will feature presentations with executives from IBM and XenSource, and a networking session with live product demonstrations on Intel Xeon Processor-based platforms with Intel Virtualization technology, and an IBM System x platform.

"Simply Virtualize is a great way for IT users to learn about virtualization as a way to reduce cost and improve IT agility," said John Bara, VP Marketing at XenSource. "Together, IBM, Intel and XenSource deliver easy-to-use, high-performance and affordably virtualization solutions."

Forrester VP Frank Gillett will keynote the webcast on March 20, 2007. Following the webcast, eighteen virtualization seminars will be held around the globe, taking place between March 22 and May 25, and focusing on teaching attendees how to minimize the cost and complexity of Windows and Linux server consolidation.

To register for the March 20 webcast which will take place at 9:00 AM PDT/12:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM GMT or to attend one of the events in the global seminar series taking place March 22 to May 10, go here.

Dates and locations for the global seminar series are:

-- March 22 - London, UK
-- March 28 - Birmingham, UK
-- April 12 - Dublin, Ireland
-- April 17 - Wellington, New Zealand
-- April 18 - Munich, Germany
-- April 19 - Frankfurt, Germany
-- April 19 - Sydney, Australia
-- April 19 - New York, US
-- April 20 - Washington D.C., US
-- April 24 - Atlanta, US
-- April 24 - Paris, France
-- April 25 - Chicago, US
-- April 26 - Dallas, US
-- April 27 - Amsterdam, Netherlands
-- May 4 - Milan, Italy
-- May 8 - San Francisco, US
-- May 10 - London, UK
-- May 25 - Madrid, Spain

Posted by David Marshall on March 14, 2007 04:39 PM

February 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)

InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum 2007 Recap

First let me say, for those of you that made it to the forum this year in San Francisco, I hope your time spent at the event was as fun and interesting as mine was. I sincerely had a great time getting the chance to talk and interact with many of you. Hopefully, we'll get another chance in the future to bump into each other.

Venue
So, what did you guys think of the venue? I found that the Hotel Nikko was a fantastic place to hold the forum. The hotel was absolutely beautiful, and the ballroom and breakout rooms easily accommodated those of us in the audience.

The food was actually pretty good. Unfortunately for one gentleman sitting next to me who was a vegetarian, he seemed to have a slightly difficult time getting his "veggie" plate as the rest of us devoured our chicken meal. Eventually it came, and hopefully he finished it off with one of those good deserts out in the exhibit area.

The Keynotes

Once again, the keynote sessions seemed fairly strong to me.

I enjoyed listening to and watching the presentation from Don Norbeck, Director of Product Development, SunGard Availability Services. His discussion about virtualization as a disruptive technology was spot on - listing best practices for an always available infrastructure.

This was followed up with a really good discussion by Carlos Montero-Luque, Vice President of Product Management, Open Platform Solutions, Novell and Mike Neil, Senior Director of Virtualization Strategy, Windows Server Division, Microsoft. We've been watching the partnership between Novell and Microsoft for months now. And this partnership continued to grow on stage as the two discussed their partnership and the joint technical roadmap leading the two companies to support interoperability, offering each other's operating systems as guest operating systems on each other other's virtualization platforms, and how the two companies would offer full support for each other's platforms going forward.

The Sessions

Unlike the event last year in New York, the San Francisco forum was only a one day event. It was difficult to catch all of the sessions and still network with everyone. And yet, with the increased number of attendees, things still seemed to move quickly but remain informative.

As usual, I knew the session on Virtualization Vendor Crossfire would be entertaining and enlightening. Tom Yager hosted Chris Barclay (Virtual Iron), Jack Lo (VMware), Gordon Mangione (XenSource) and Mike Neil (Microsoft) as they discussed the different approaches taken to each of their core technology offerings. This was followed by an excellent discussion about Polyserve's offering and how it is being used in the real world by companies such as Avanade.

A number of interesting breakout sessions followed that offered something for everyone. The discussions went from storage solutions, to software testing, to desktop virtualization and another on how to wrap things up and put them into production.

For me, the evening was capped off perfectly with Doug Dineley hosting a panel talking about Virtualization Futures: Trends and Forecasts. There was nothing held back in this discussion. I was quite impressed with Scott Jones, Product Manager, Altiris. He is always good for a great discussion.

Perhaps the highlight for me was having a small breakout session with a few people who read or listen to the Virtualization Report. We had a great discussion about virtualization that walked the line from storage, application, and server virtualization and back again. What I liked most was the round table discussion format, free form, and we each just asked one another whatever came to mind. Thank you guys for showing up and participating!

Exhibitors

This year, the number of exhibitors at the show once again proved how much virtualization is expanding and gaining traction in the community, as the number of booths grew to what seemed like at least a 3x multiplier compared with the forum held only a few months ago. The booths were obviously manned by experienced employees of the company, each offering great interaction and conversation about their different offerings.

I was extremely happy to get some hands-on time with the different products. Many of the exhibitors were demonstrating their wares with an actual demo of the product, which really helped me visualize and understand what it was they had to offer. Thanks to vThere, AppStream and Altiris, SWsoft, PlateSpin, and CA for showing me your products.

Thanks to everyone who helped make me feel at home at the show. We have some really great readers and sponsors. I look forward to seeing you all again next time. If you didn't make it to the forum this time, don't miss out on the next one!

Posted by David Marshall on February 15, 2007 04:42 PM

February 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Are You Attending InfoWorld's Virtualization Executive Forum?

Are you planning on attending the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum on February 12, 2007 in San Francisco?

If you haven't signed up yet, don't worry, it isn't too late!

For those of you attending, I know you won't be disappointed. Last year's event in New York was extremely interesting and covered a wide variety of topics.

And once again, I am fortunate to be able to attend the forum, and I look forward to getting the chance to meet with those of you that have been reading and listening to the Virtualization Report. When I return from the trip, I hope to provide those that couldn't attend with an updated report on all of the excitement that took place.

See you in San Francisco!

Posted by David Marshall on February 10, 2007 08:00 AM

February 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)

How Can Virtual Lab Automation Help You?

VMware is offering three new Webinars to help educate people on the use of Virtual Lab Automation as it begins to promote one of their latest offerings - VMware Lab Manager.

Overview of Virtual Lab Automation
Wednesday, February 14, 2007 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time
1 hour
Find out how to:

Reduce the capital and operating expense of maintaining disparate systems in the test lab
Shorten the time you spend provisioning configurations by up to 50%
Give development and test teams self-service access to multi-machine configurations

Market Snapshot: Virtual Lab AutomationWednesday, February 28, 2007 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time
1 hour
Learn how your peers are:

Tackling infrastructure and process challenges associated with supporting the development and testing of complex applications and systems
Making the decision to adopt Virtual Lab Automation
Benefiting from the results of virtualizing and automating the test lab

Real-world experiences in the virtual labWednesday, March 14, 2007 9:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time
1 hour
Hear about:

How Virtual Lab Automation eliminates repetitive provisioning of complex test environments
Successes, quantifiable results and savings from the VMware Lab Manager implementation
Lessons learned in adopting Virtual Lab Automation

Go here to register.

Posted by David Marshall on February 10, 2007 06:52 AM

February 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)

United Devices' Annual Conference Adds Virtualization Thought Leaders

United Devices is hosting its third annual conference, dubbed UD:07, to be held on March 7th and 8th in Boston at the Sheraton Hotel near Copley Square.

This year's theme, "Grid in 2007: Virtual Reality", hopes to cut through the noise surrounding mainstream virtualization by showcasing practical implementations that prove value in the data center and managed services arenas.

A Who's Who of global virtualization innovators are planned for attendance. Early confirmed speakers at UD:07 include:

BMC: Tom Bishop, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer
SAP: Roland Wartenberg, Platform Ecosystem Evangelist
Bristol-Myers Squibb: Tim Wagner, Director, Scientific Computing Services
Corus Automotive: Mike Twelves, Manager, KBE and IT Systems
Hewlett Packard: Norm Lindsey, Chief Architect, Flexible Computing Business Unit
Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development LLC: Jeff Mathers, director, Technology Office Strategy & Delivery
Raytheon: Les Stewart, Manager, Senior Principal Technologist, Raytheon Missile Systems IT
Schrodinger: Peter Shenkin, Vice President
Satyam Computer Services: Grid Computing Experts
United Devices: Jikku Venkat, Chief Information Officer
Economic Strategy Institute: Dr. Robert B. Cohen, Senior Fellow
Open Grid Forum: Mark Linesch, President
The 451 Group: William Fellows, Principal Analyst, and Steve Wallage, Director of Research

The conference is targeted toward business sponsors and executive decision-makers who want to connect with colleagues who are now deploying advanced virtualization strategies, including higher level automation in data centers and for managed services.

To register or find more information on the conference, visit the following Web site.

Posted by David Marshall on February 3, 2007 09:40 PM

February 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Reducing Data Center Costs and Complexity Using Virtual Storage and Virtual Servers

DataCore Software and Virtual Iron Software recently announced that DataCore's SANmelody solution would be a certified virtual storage solution on Virtual Iron's enterprise-class server virtualization products.

Now, both companies are showing off how the two products interoperate to help reduce both data center costs and complexity through a joint Webinar session.

Date and Time: Thursday, February 8, 2007 11:00 AM Eastern Standard Time (GMT -05:00, New York)
Panelist(s) Info: Tom Twyman, Systems Engineer, DataCore Software; Chris Barclay, Director of Product Management, Virtual Iron Software
Duration: 1 hour
Description: Combining DataCore Virtual Storage and Virtual Iron Virtual Servers for Cost-Efficient, High-Performance Virtualization

Virtual servers and virtual storage attack the same fundamental challenge - improving resource utilization and optimizing data center resources so that they can be readily deployed when and where they are needed. These solutions are especially powerful when are used in combination to create Virtual Infrastructure.

Virtual Iron and DataCore are delivering on this promise with enterprise-class virtual infrastructure management capabilities at a fraction of the cost of alternative solutions. This webcast will highlight the combined Virtual Iron and DataCore solution and how it enables users to drive down enterprise data center costs and create a more flexible and agile infrastructure that can respond to the needs of the business. The presenters will also demonstrate comprehensive capabilities for:

Hot backup
Rapid provisioning
High availability with virtual servers and virtual storage
Disaster recovery
Automated capacity management

To enroll for this Webinar, click here.

Posted by David Marshall on February 3, 2007 05:02 PM

January 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)

SunGard to Deliver Keynote at InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum

IDG's InfoWorld has secured Don Norbeck of SunGard Availability Services to provide the keynote address at their second Virtualization Executive Forum on February 12, 2007 at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco, CA.

Norbeck, SunGard's director of product development, will offer prescriptive strategies for developing and managing a framework for virtualization in the data center. In "Virtual Reality: Leveraging IT Best Practices for an Always Available Infrastructure," he'll share best practices for transforming your infrastructure and business to meet the challenges of real-world client scenarios.

"SunGard Availability Services is implementing virtualization as a way to enhance a world-class, high-availability services infrastructure," said Doug Dineley, InfoWorld's executive editor and content chair for the event. "We're way beyond server consolidation now. I'm really looking forward to Don Norbeck's talk."

This event will offer presentations and panels with leading experts from VMware, Surgient, XenSource, Inc., and Microsoft Corp.; end users from Bank of America, Brigham Young University, Avanade, T-Systems, and ABM Industries; and InfoWorld's own top editors to put virtualization into perspective. The complete agenda is available online, here.

Don't forget to mark the date down on your calendar! Go ahead and register now and I'll see you there.

Posted by David Marshall on January 27, 2007 09:03 AM

January 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)

InfoWorld's Virtualization Executive Forum - Round Two

InfoWorld recently sent out a press release announcing that it had set the agenda for their second Virtualization Executive Forum that will take place on February 12, 2007 at the Hotel Nikko, in San Francisco. The focus this year will be on "Enabling Virtualization Across the Enterprise."

I attended last year's event in New York and had a fantastic time. Steve Fox kicked things off in high gear last year, going right at the virtualization topic explaining it in a way so that the entire room could not only understand it but more importantly so that they could see the value in it.

The keynotes were all informative and had little overlap as each presenter brought the story of virtualization home. The breakout sessions and the exhibitors each did their job to help identify ways in which virtualization can make your business more efficient, cost-effective or productive.

If I didn't get a chance to meet you last year, I'd love to interact with you this year. I hope to see everyone there. A lot has happened in the industry since last September, and I can't wait to hear what people have to say this time.

Here is the press announcement in case you missed it. It contains some more information about this year's event.

IDG's InfoWorld, the leading integrated media brand for IT solutions management, today unveiled the agenda for its second Virtualization Executive Forum, taking place Monday, February 12, 2007 at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco. The executive-level event provides real-world guidance and best practices for dynamically managing the IT environment. The Virtualization Executive Forum premiered last September 25-26 in New York City and attracted 300+ senior-level technology and business professionals looking to understand benefits and next steps associated with implementing an enterprise-wide virtualization strategy. February's event will highlight the most popular sessions from September and explore building and deploying server, storage, application and desktop virtualization technologies to reduce hardware costs, enhance business agility, improve deployment cycles, create a foundation for disaster recovery, and more. Passes to attend InfoWorld's Virtualization Executive Forum are priced at $1,195, with credential, subscriber and early registration discounts available. Members of the press using promotional code VIRTPRESS are eligible for complimentary registration. To register, visit: http://VirtExecForum.com/register.
"Last year, x86 server virtualization jumped out of the test lab and into production environments," said Doug Dineley, InfoWorld's executive editor and content chair for the event. "At our February 12th conference, we'll hear from IT execs that made that leap and zero in on the benefits, challenges, and best practices for moving to a virtualized infrastructure. Server, storage, application, and desktop virtualization - and what they offer to the enterprise - are all on the agenda."

The Virtualization Executive Forum agenda features leading experts from companies defining enterprise virtualization across industries and end users that have successfully implemented a virtualization strategy for their business. Presenters and panelists include: Dr. J. Kelly Flanagan, Information Technology Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Brigham Young University; Marcus MacNeill, Director of Product Strategy, Surgient; Gordon Mangione, Senior Vice President of Product Operations, XenSource, Inc.; Mike Neil, Senior Director of Virtualization Strategy, Microsoft Corp.; Steve Norall, Senior Analyst and Consultant, Taneja Group; Don Norbeck, Director of Product Development, SunGard Availability Services; James Phillips, Senior Director of Software Lifecycle Solutions, VMware; and Alex Vasilevsky, CTO and Founder, Virtual Iron Software. Plus, InfoWorld's top editors will be on hand to share their expertise. The complete agenda is available online at: http://VirtExecForum.com.

InfoWorld's second forum on virtualization continues to attract support from the top vendors driving enterprise virtualization, including: Novell and Microsoft Corp. (Cornerstone sponsors); PolyServe, Red Hat, Inc., and PlateSpin (Platinum-level sponsors); Altiris, CA, EMC Corporation, and Egenera (Gold-level sponsors).

Posted by David Marshall on January 9, 2007 07:28 PM

November 26, 2006 | Comments: (0)

LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit

If you didn't believe that virtualization was making a huge splash into the Linux and open source community, maybe this will help shape your opinion - Virtualization has its own track at the next LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit being held at the Marriott Marquis in New York, NY on February 14th and 15th of 2007.

The summit includes proven best practices from IT pioneers who have used open source to enable robust, innovative solutions that deliver solid business impact. It offers two full days of real-world peer case studies, intensive technical training, insightful keynotes, and cutting-edge solutions to prepare you for the next generation of open initiatives.

The virtualization track currently consists of the following sessions:

Case Study: Shared Penguins: How to Have Hundreds of Virtual Servers With a Shared Root - Speaker Steve Womer of Nationwide Insurance: We have implemented a shared file system, in our zLinux environment. This allows us to share the linux binaries among several hundred servers, reducing our disk requirements by 57%. This session will discuss our approach, advantages and disadvantages.
Virtualization and the Next generation Data Center - Mike Grandinetti from Virtual Iron moderates a panel discussion - Virtualization holds great promise, but many first and second generation virtualization technologies compound the problem by adding cost and complexity in the form of virtual server sprawl, new management requirements and performance overhead. Emerging virtualization technologies are addressing these shortcomings and enabling leading enterprises to take virtualization to the next level. Virtualization has become a key strategy to reduce the complexity and cost involved with managing and operating data centers. This panel session will discuss these emerging technologies and examine how they can be leveraged to make the data center more efficient, flexible and agile while dramatically reducing cost and complexity.
GEP and PGA: Linux Grid Computing in Financial Modeling and Drug Discovery - Speaker Daming Li of LITEC Systems Corporation - Gene Expression Programming (GEP) and Parallel Genetic Algorithm (PGA) on Linux grid computing cluster have proven to be a very effective way of tackling intensive mathematical problems in financial modeling and drug discovery. Based on the features of stock objects, we present our GEP grid computing models including the fitness that appropriated to the special rules of stocks, give experiments and analysis on the real stock price index of NYSE. The results show that the precision that predicts by using our models is higher than traditional method. The availability of molecular structures of drug targets and candidate compounds has opened the door for the application of large scale grid computing technology to conduct virtual drug design. Through the use of PGA on Linux grid computing cluster, we developed the computing power to effectively discover potential drug candidates. Our models generate better profiles of combinatorial drug candidates optimized by PGA.
Virtualize Your Entire Data Center - Speaker Alasdair Rawsthorne from Transitive - Virtualization solutions for Intel's industry-standard microprocessors are well known in the industry, and data center managers are implementing them increasingly to consolidate servers to achieve higher utilization, provide resilience, and to improve costs by operating much more flexibly than in the past. The latest hardware virtualization technology, which for the first time provides true instruction set architecture (ISA) independence, has synergies with other emerging virtualization technologies that allow managers to virtualize an entire data center without any application source code or binary changes and at speeds comparable to native ports.

This talk will show you how to consolidate RISC and UNIX workloads onto industry-standard microprocessors, to achieve even greater consolidation than previously. An architectural description introduces you to new technologies for moving applications between platforms. A case study examines the process of virtualizing an entire heterogeneous data center, and a demo gives you a first hand experience of a single virtualized consolidated system supporting multiple instruction sets and operating systems.
Linux Virtualization Technology Alternatives - Speaker Kir Kolyshkin of OpenVZ - Different virtualization approaches (emulation, hypervisor-based, operating system-level) and their pros and cons are outlined. Details of the OS-level virtualization approach are given, using OpenVZ as an implementation example. Operating system features - virtualization, isolation, resource management and checkpointing - are described, as well as user-level tools. Possible usage scenarios of virtualization are presented.
Virtualization's Impact on Enterprise Security - Speaker Kris Lamb of ISS - Virtualization alone does not equal security. As virtualization is rapidly deployed worldwide, it is critical to understand the business risks at the network, application and behavioral levels. Kris Lamb of Internet Security Systems will discuss issues related to securing virtual assets from exploits and malware and how to provide defense-in-depth for your environment. Throughout this session, Lamb will reveal how the evolving virtualization market space can be leveraged to innovate organizations' security processes to both protect the infrastructure as well as meet the rising standard of due care with corporate compliance.
Case Study: Living in a Virtual World - Speaker Bruce McMillan of Solvay - This session will describe the server consolidation project of Solvay Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in Marietta, GA. Topics covered will include; needs analysis, proof of concept, design and testing, implementation, cost savings and lessons learned.

You can register for the summit, here.

Posted by David Marshall on November 26, 2006 04:11 PM

November 10, 2006 | Comments: (0)

VMware Announces Winners of Virtual Vanguard Awards

As promised, VMware announced the winners of the first-ever Virtual Vanguard Awards during a ceremony at VMworld 2006. The awards recognize VMware customers who have best employed VMware Infrastructure to create innovative, high-ROI and leading-edge IT strategies. The Virtual Vanguard Awards judging panel consisted of Stephen Elliot, research manager for IDC's Enterprise Systems Management Software Service; Eric Kuzmack, IT architect at Gannett; Jonathan Paul, advisory analyst at Siemens Medical Solutions Health Services; and several judges from VMware.

The winners represent achievements in four categories:

Best Overall ROI and Operational Benefits - This award showcases the company that has seen the quickest and largest ROI using VMware technology. The entries were judged on the overall impact of costs avoided, time-to-ROI or operational benefits-not the largest or quickest ROI in terms of absolute numbers. The judges also looked at the effect of virtualization on total IT budget, operational performance and/or corporate bottom line.

IndyMac Bancorp, Inc., the winner in this category, used VMware virtualization software to create an efficient and flexible infrastructure, saving 60 percent on the cost of hardware and 76 percent on network infrastructure, equating to a total savings of nearly $4 million.

Most Comprehensive VMware Infrastructure - This award honors the most comprehensive VMware Infrastructure deployment based on a combination of total size and on amount of total infrastructure virtualized. The judges looked for customers utilizing virtualization technology in multiple ways across their IT infrastructure, from desktop to data center and from development to production, and have virtualized at least 50 percent of their development, staging and production environments.

The winning submission came from Phoenix Insurance Company, which has virtualized more than 80 percent of its development, pre-production and production environments. In addition, the company has used VMware software to create a separate disaster recovery setup.

Most Critical Application in Production - This award recognizes the most mission-critical application running on VMware Infrastructure. "Mission-critical" was defined by the consequences of application failure: Should this application become unavailable for any noticeable length of time, the impact on the applicant's company would be serious. Examples of such serious consequences might include loss of revenue, broken service-level agreements, customers unable to pay bills or place orders, violations of regulatory compliance rules and compromised security.

The winner in this category, Tescom, runs many of its mission-critical enterprise applications on VMware Infrastructure, including e-mail servers, customer relationship management applications and accounting and finance applications, all of which are used by employees around the globe.

Vanguard Award for Innovation - This award honors customers who have taken virtualization to new levels, leveraging the technology to push the envelope and create unique, innovative solutions to IT challenges. The winner, Stowers Institute for Medical Research, created a virtual desktop grid by using VMware Player to harness the idle CPU time of its Windows desktop computers. When most desktops are idle at night, the virtual grid provides a significant contribution to the institute's full-time physical compute grid.

"Our customers break the boundaries of traditional computing by leveraging virtualization and VMware products, and we continue to be amazed and impressed by their creativity and innovation," said Diane Greene, VMware President. "VMware remains committed to delivering software that helps customers solve complex business challenges and realize significant benefits. The Virtual Vanguard Awards are our way of highlighting some of the ways customers have used our products to achieve such benefits."

Posted by David Marshall on November 10, 2006 09:08 AM

November 04, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Virtualization Report Goes to VMworld 2006

If news slows down a bit over the next few days, it is because I will be attending VMware's VMworld 2006 event in Los Angeles.

The good news, I'm sure there will be plenty of news coming out of the show. I believe the anticipated amount of attendees (last I heard) was somewhere in the neighborhood of 6000+ people. It just goes to show you how popular the virtualization topic is becoming. Only a year ago, VMworld 2005 in Las Vegas had about 3000+ people. In essence, the audience has doubled in less than a year. And I expect the exhibitor booths to have also dramatically increased in participation and perhaps size. We are starting to see many more companies joining into the virtualization game, and I expect to see plenty of new companies showing off their wares this year. And I'll be there to report on each of them, just as soon as I figure out how to clone myself!

For those of you attending the show, please try to catch me and say hello while you are there. I'll be presenting two sessions during the show, doing a book signing at the VMworld Bookstore, and walking around the exhibit floor like a kid in a candy store. Hope to see you there!

Posted by David Marshall on November 4, 2006 07:33 PM

October 01, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Webinar: The New Economics of Virtualization

Intel and Virtual Iron have teamed up to provide this 1 hour WebEx webinar on Tuesday, October 3, 2006 at 10:00 am CDT (GMT -5:00, Chicago).

Listen as Jim Fister from Intel and Mike Grandinetti from Virtual Iron talk about emerging virtualization solutions that leverage industry-standard and open source technologies to make the data center more efficient and flexible and deliver new levels of ROI. They will discuss the role of emerging technologies like hardware-assisted virtualization, open source hypervisors and policy-based automation that enable the virtualization of enterprise-class workloads.

Attendees will also learn about:

Leveraging new technologies like Xen and Intel VT to dramatically change the economics of virtualization

Using virtualization to create more flexible infrastructure and deliver computing capacity on demand

Reducing the time it takes to provision and redeploy severs and applications from days/weeks to minutes

Supporting unmodified 32 and 64-bit Windows and Linux operating systems on a single virtualization platform

Running enterprise-class applications on virtual infrastructure

Centrally managing virtual computers and physical servers

Posted by David Marshall on October 1, 2006 02:04 PM

September 28, 2006 | Comments: (0)

InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum 2006 Day 2

For those of you in attendance, I hope you were able to make it to both days of the forum. Day 1 offered a lot of insight into the how and why of virtualization. And day 2 looked to be ready to capitalize on that momentum and continue to run the course for those able to make the second day.

Party

At the conclusion of day 1, Novell sponsored an evening cocktail and networking reception in the grand ballroom. The mixer had a good turnout, and there was no shortage of food or drink. Tables were setup with the usual cocktail party foods, and there were servers walking around offering up a number of different food items. With two bar areas setup, it was quite easy to get a drink refill and continue having good conversation. Everyone there seemed to have a really good time. But one individual started the party off on a much higher note - if you signed up for a drawing at Novell's exhibit booth, you had a chance to win a slick looking, green laptop computer running Novell SUSE Linux. Unfortunately for me, I didn't win... but I was still able to have a good time along with everyone else.

The Keynote

I thought the keynote presentations on day 1 were done extremely well. Each one offered valuable insight and presented the technologies and value of virtualization in a clear and concise manner so that everyone in the room could understand. I wasn't sure how they could top it, or even come close.

Andi Mann, Senior Analyst from Enterprise Management Associates, put on quite a presentation. If you weren't sure of the different areas or approaches of virtualization before the presentation started, you certainly walked out of the ballroom with a much better handle on where we are and where we are headed after the presentation concluded. The discussion detailed how many of these areas are approaching significant maturity, while other areas are only now starting to energize the market. Throughout the discussion, he spoke about how these techniques are providing significant benefits in many areas, but also kept it real by saying that these same virtualization techniques also pose new and unique challenges that have to be met. Again, like the previous keynotes, I highly recommend you download Andi Mann's slide presentation for more information.

The Sessions

Unfortunately, I was not able to stay until the conclusion of the forum. However, I did get a chance to see Paul Venezia's two panel discussions that took us through the process of a physical to virtual implementation. To set the stage, Paul introduced the audience to his "faux company" and we were walked through the process of how they should migrate from a traditional IT world to one powered by a virtualization solution. It was an interesting way to get the discussion going, and also helped the audience put things into perspective as they go through some of the same pain points.

The discussion was broken up into two sessions. The first session covered the planning stages and went into specifics such as skillset needed, software licensing issues, performance and resource utilization metrics, and hardware platform requirements and considerations. The second session continued with the topic but this time focusing on the deployment side. The panel talked about their challenges and the pitfalls that can be avoided, and they discussed the different tools that are now available to help with a P2V migration. If you haven't already gone through this process, these panel experts definitely gave the audience a lot of food for thought to take back with them.

Conclusion

Each day, InfoWorld provided a questionnaire sheet and asked that the attendees fill them out and turn them back in. Hopefully, many of you were able to do just that. While I certainly enjoyed myself, learned new things, found new products, met new people and had interesting conversation... the forum was for you. It was for you to gain a better understanding of this whole virtualization notion, where does it fit within your organization? What can it do for you? And which solution will work best for you and the way you do business? It is important to get your feedback on things like this so that next year's forum can be even better.

For those of you that spoke with me, thank you. I sincerely enjoyed hearing about your products, ideas and implementation stories as well as seeing your enthusiasm for a technology that I love. I hope to see you again next year.

If you have any thoughts about the show and want to share them with me, you can either post them here for all to read, or drop me an email. I'd love to chat more about it.

Posted by David Marshall on September 28, 2006 06:17 AM

September 27, 2006 | Comments: (0)

InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum 2006 Day 1

For those of you who were unable to attend the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum 2006 event that took place on Monday and Tuesday of this week, you missed a really great time!

Venue

The Roosevelt Hotel seemed to be a fantastic venue for the first InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum. The Grand Ballroom was the perfect size to fit the event, and the table and chair layout was not only comfortable, but offered a great way to meet and interact with peers. It was quite easy to talk with and meet the people sitting at your table. The usual rows of chairs at events don't make it easy to speak with anyone except for the two people sitting on each side of you.

And what a great mix of people in attendance, from many diverse companies and backgrounds, and different levels of virtualization knowledge and experience. It was great fun speaking with decision makers to find out their thoughts and ideas around virtualization and how they think it fits in their organization. They wanted to know how it affected their bottom line, and they listened intently to the speakers, exhibitors, and those of us walking around the floor.

The stage was setup in a way that there really wasn't a bad seat in the room. Which is odd for me, I'm used to getting into a session late and not being able to hear or see what's going on. The event also had a second room, the Plaza Suite for other break out sessions as well. The room was smaller than the ballroom, but comfortably fit everyone in the sessions that I was able to attend.

Security was high on my first day at the Roosevelt. After getting my luggage scanned at the airport, I thought I was all set. Who knew it would be scanned again at the hotel. This was my first trip to the big apple, and I didn't know if this was customary or not. Come to find out, this isn't an everyday occurrence, nor was this due to the forum. It seems that important people were in town this week... but who were in New York for something bigger than virtualization (is that possible?).

And might I add, this was the best dressed IT forum that I have been to yet. I don't think I've seen this many suites and ties at an IT forum in my life! No shorts and t-shirts with geek phrases at this forum, that's for sure!

The Keynotes

The keynotes did not disappoint. In fact, the general tone and overview of each keynote session simply reiterated what I have already come to know and talk about regularly... virtualization is catching on and the keynote speakers reiterated this notion. In the first two morning keynote sessions, the two speakers really brought it home, each talking to the subject at a high level. Steve Fox kicked off the forum in high gear, explaining the various types of virtualization, their benefits, and noting that "It's all about the business". One of the main questions asked at every forum was "will the slides be made available at some point for download?" So before people could ask, Steve let the audience know, the presentations will be made available on October 1st at virtexecforum.com. So watch for the slides!

Steve Yatko (CTO, Managing Director, Global Head of R&D, Credit Suisse Securities) and Dr. Jeff Jaffe (Executive Vice President, CTO, Novell) each did a fantastic job of keeping the audience's attention with a high level business discussion around virtualization, and did so with very little overlap. The challenges and benefits of virtualization were explored. Dr. Jaffe interjected a bit of humor into his discussion as he talked about the changing world. Open-source technology was one of the key topics here, and its future was heavily discussed.

There was a lot of information and a lot to take in from each of these presentations, and whether you were in the audience or not, I would highly recommend downloading the slides when made available to go back over them. The presentations were both well received, and the ballroom was packed.

The Sessions

The general and breakout sessions were a little less formal than the key note sessions. Using a more Q&A panel discussion layout, the audience was able to hear a nice mix of expertise and use case scenarios. The topics on day 1 ran the gambit. Panel experts talked about storage virtualization, virtual server sprawl problems, the how and why virtualization was found to be needed in different environments, product complexity, scalability and metrics needed to determine if costs or productivity are being met, as well as covering applications that leverage virtualization such as through development and testing.

One of the sessions I enjoyed that dug deep into the virtualization products itself was "Inside Hardware Assisted Virtualization". For the techie, this one was a must see. It was great to hear VMware, XenSource, Microsoft and Virtual Iron representatives all on the stage at the same time, talking about their products and where they overlap or depart. Unlike some of the other sessions, this one was most definitely not a high level discussion. This one dug deep into paravirtualization, hypervisors, drivers, and more.

If I were a virtual machine, I would have cloned myself to be able to see and hear everything. Unfortunately, I could not. The drawback to having a lot of things going on at once... you end up missing a few things.

The Exhibitors

If you wanted to find out more information about each of the contributing sponsors of this year's forum, you didn't have to go far. Each sponsor had their own exhibit booth that was manned by well informed employees who were all too eager to talk about their company's product. Unlike some forum events where the exhibit booths are manned by spokes models, this time I was actually able to have an intelligent conversation with the person manning the booth and walk away with a better understanding of the company, its product, and where they fit in the realm of virtualization. Don't get me wrong, I didn't simply leave with information in hand, for those of you wondering, yes, the exhibitors brought swag. I didn't escape with any Hollywood swag, but the usual tech giveaways were out there: pens, USB drives, shirts, hats, a cool time piece, a plush SUSE toy (for my daughter of course) and more. Oddly enough, none of the exhibitors were making people scream out catch phrases or play games for prizes. They simply made them available. Which I suppose goes back to the whole "well dressed attendees" thing.

Posted by David Marshall on September 27, 2006 04:41 PM

September 17, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Acopia Networks Showcases Intelligent File Virtualization

Acopia Networks, which provides high-performance, intelligent file virtualization, announced it will showcase ARX solutions at the Storage World Conference, Fall 2006 that takes place on September 19-21, 2006 at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston, Massachusetts.

Kirby Wadsworth, Acopia's senior VP of marketing and business development, will join a panel discussion entitled, "The Virtues of Virtualization", which takes place on Tuesday, September 19 at 2:00 PM. The panel will examine the current state of the storage virtualization market as well as its anticipated rapid growth.

"High cost, stranded capacity, disruptive processes, and performance issues are persistent problems in today's enterprise datacenter," said Wadsworth. "The raw cost of storage is falling, but IT budgets aren't benefiting because the disruption and switching costs associated with traditional technologies are high. IT managers feel locked in. Intelligent file virtualization breaks the bonds, letting customers take full and immediate advantage of new technologies, and changing market conditions." He added, "I am delighted to have been invited to join such an esteemed group of panel participants to discuss and debate the current status and future direction of the file virtualization space."

Acopia will offer a demonstration that will highlight the value of intelligent file virtualization, and its ability to simplify file storage management. Specifically, it provides the ability to:

Migrate large numbers of files, transparently to users, without scheduled outages

Tier data to appropriate storage media automatically and continuously - freeing expensive high-performance disk and dramatically reducing storage and backup costs

Increase utilization and optimize performance with advanced real-time load balancing

Replicate data efficiently and flexibly to ensure data protection and high availability

Posted by David Marshall on September 17, 2006 04:36 PM

September 17, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Webcast: A Software Virtualization Panel Discussion

Altiris invites people to attend a 1 hour complimentary webcast on Wednesday, September 20 at 1 p.m. EDT (6 p.m. GMT, Europe).

Join Altiris and an expert panel to discuss software virtualization technology, the virtualization landscape as well as how Altiris Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) fits into this space.

This live event will provide you the opportunity to get your questions answered by members of the panel including Altiris experts, Michael Dortch (Principal Business Analyst for Robert Frances Group), and an Altiris partner that is working on SVS implementations.

Some of the topics this panel will be prepared to discuss:

How software virtualization is different from what is being seen in the server realm

How IT organizations can get value from software virtualization

Why companies have selected SVS and how SVS has been implemented in these organizations

Altiris' future vision for SVS and upcoming features