Virtualization Congress Sessions

	Cody Bunch Virtualization Engineer Rackspace
	Patrick Ancillotti Virtualization Engineer Rackspace

In this session we'll cover the basics of Microsoft PowerShell, and show you how to leverage the power of your hybrid virtual infrastructures using PowerShell.

We'll also cover how to get the various toolkits needed to get up and running, and the what's and how's of what to automate in a heterogeneous virtual environment. The goal is to change the way you think about scripting for your choice of virtual environments.

	Ron Oglesby Practice Executive, Virtualization Dell

In this session Ron Oglesby will share his best practices for successfully designing and implementing large scale virtualization projects. Ron will review the major phases of a virtualization project, the critical decisions for the project and when they need to be made, how to deal with push back/objections, how to gain CIO/VP level backing, and where most projects fail/stall and how to avoid this.

This session agenda includes:

• Assessment and business case
  • What’s really important to you and the boss
  • What numbers you should or should not use

• Designing the environment
  • Critical decision points and design strategy
  • What decisions have to be made up front
  • What decisions can be pushed into the implementation
  • The process of vendor selection, hardware, storage and networking
  • Typical design options and who to include in the process

• Implementing the solution
  • Planning – the big and small of the project plan
  • Where are the common problems virtualization plans
  • How / when to do candidate selection and workload analysis

• Maintaining the environment
  • What Processes and SOPs do I need to manage this long term
  • Where most organizations fall down in their first implementations and how to avoid it

	Debasish Biswas VP of HyperSpace/HyperCore Phoenix Technologies

Embedding a layer of Linux-based virtualization into core system firmware opens up a new development environment for lightweight, single-purpose applications that exist outside of the main OS. This presentation provides a framework for building applications that leverage embedded virtualization engines, launched from secure storage areas that enforce the chain of trust from the boot block using the processor and chipset mechanism, the on-board TPM device and other miscellaneous crypto-engine services. Learn how purpose-driven applications function in a Linux virtualization environment, existing independent of the OS and providing instant-on/off access, power savings and security.

	Mike DiPetrillo Principal Systems Engineer of Datacenter and Cloud Architecture VMware

Today's datacenter has become a complex environment of open and closed systems; distributed and centralized resources; and a huge cost center and bottleneck for the business. IT needs to change and it needs to start in the datacenter. In this session we'll talk about what the industry is doing to change the way the datacenter works and how it's designed. The good news is you don't have to throw everything out to get there. Come learn how to take what you have now and transform it into a highly efficient service platform for the future.

	Tim Wegner Vice President, Product Dev, High Availability Solutions Stratus Technologies
	Daniel Kusnetzky Principal Analyst KG LLC

Many organizations that are embarking on the journey to a more virtualized environment are more concerned with performance, consolidation or optimal use of server resources than preventing disasters. Availability and reliability just isn't part of their thinking until they actually experience a problem.

This presentation will examine the following concepts:

• Creating a highly available virtualized environment
• Hardware versus software approaches to availability
• Fault tolerance versus high availability
• What is enough availability?
• How can we make an informed decision?

In the end, availability, like management and security, is best when it is "baked into" the architecture of an environment rather than something brought into the environment after the architecture is in place and solutions are in place.

	Richard Jones Service Director, Data Center Strategies Burton Group

In this session, Richard Jones dissects the competitive differences that exist with today's leading hypervisors, with a special focus on the under-the-hood features that don't make it onto vendor data sheets.

Attendees of this session will see firsthand the differences that exist with all major virtualization hypervisor vendors (e.g. VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, Virtual Iron, Sun, Novell, and Red Hat) and will leave with a list of pointed questions to ask prospective hypervisor vendors regarding their current solutions and future plans.

	Edwin Yuen Technical Product Manager, Integrated Virtualization Strategy Microsoft

Interested to learn more about System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008?
Thinking about using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 with your existing VMware installation?
Learn how you can manage both the physical and virtual, and Hyper-V and VMware servers, all with System Center. Scenarios to be covered are physical to virtual migration, new virtual machine provisioning, centralized management of virtual machines, and much more. See all the new features of SCVMM 2008 R2 , including support for live migration using Hyper-V or VMware ESX, and SAN-related enhancements. This is a must see session for anyone who has or is planning on deploying Hyper-V and ESX infrastructure or wants to see the latest Microsoft System Center virtualization management tool.

	Scott Lowe National Technical Lead ePlus Technology

Lots of storage vendors claim to be the best platform for virtualized environments. But can their advanced storage functionality--like space- efficient clones, or snapshots, or replication--actually be leveraged in virtualized environments? What are the "gotchas" if you try? What are the workarounds? How should I go about designing my back-end storage for virtualization? What are the considerations?

There are lots of very important questions that users would like answered. This session won't be able to answer them all, but it will at least try to answer some of them, and give food for thought for the rest.

	Christofer Hoff Chief Security Architect Unisys

Mozart's sequel to the Barber of Seville was lauded as one of the most profound works of its time.
Its staggering complexity, inviting overtures, rich textures and variety of orchestration were perceived by many as unapproachable, unfathomable and in some cases unintelligible.

Yet so remarkable and unique was the composition, that people flocked to its performances although in many cases they were blinded by the simplicity of its underlying complexity.
Such are the parallels with the deeply profound cacophony surrounding the issues of securing Cloud Computing and the tonal miscues hidden amongst its various acts.

This presentation will review the most pressing security, privacy, sustainability and resiliency issues surrounding the marriage of convenience, economics and computing.

	Abolfazl Sirjani Co-chair, Virtualization Management Committee DMTF

Interoperability and portability of applications are key for customers that have purchased virtualization platforms from more than one vendor, or that want to take advantage of virtualized IT infrastructure cloud service offerings.

In this session we will discuss and demonstrate how leading virtualization vendors, such as Citrix, VMware and Microsoft, have embraced the DMTF standards in their products to achieve interoperability. In addition, management tools that are developed using these standards will be demonstrated.

If you are interested to learn more about the details of DMTF's Virtualization Management standards, you should attend the Simplifying Virtualization Management Using New Industry Standards session.

	Ruben Spruijt Solutions Architect and CTO PQR
	Jeroen van de Kamp Enterprise Architect and CTO Login Consultants

We are gearing up to release multiple whitepapers about the scalability of virtualized Citrix/Terminal Servers and virtual desktop workloads with physical hardware, VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer.
We will perform a considerable amount of test-runs using Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) in our labs to validate all conclusions.

We want to investigate and validate:

• How does Windows XP compare to Vista as a virtual desktop?
• How does a VDI infrastructure scale in comparison (virtualized) Terminal Server?
• Which performance optimization on the host and guest virtualization level can be configured, and what is the impact of these settings on user density?
• With the introduction of the latest hypervisor technologies, can we now recommend running large scale TS/CTX workloads on a virtualization platform?
• How do the two usage scenarios compare, that is Microsoft Terminal Server (TS) only, versus TS plus XenApp?
• How do x86 and x64 TS platforms compare in scalability on bare metal and virtualized environments?
• What is the best way to partition (memory and vCPU) the virtual machines on a XenServer host, to achieve the highest possible user density?

	Winston Bumpus President DMTF

As organizations look to maximize investments in the heterogeneous data center, the issue of vendor interoperability comes to the fore. Capitalizing on multi-vendor industry standards is at the heart of any data center optimization effort.

This session will address the challenges and opportunities in a multi-vendor environment, and explain how the DMTF's Virtualization Management Initiative (VMAN) and standards including the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) and the Virtualization Management Profiles will form the foundation of an interoperable end-to-end management strategy in today's distributed infrastructures.

If you are interested to learn more about the how major virtualization vendors plans to adopt DMTF's standards in their products, you should attend the My Cloud or Your? The importance of standards-based virtual infrastructure management session.

	Dave Glatfelter Product Alliance Manager HP

What do you need to know about storage if you are deploying virtual desktops?
This session covers best practices and storage requirements for virtual desktops environments, focused on capacity utilization, performance, high availability, and management.
The session uses examples from both VMware and Citrix virtual desktop environments.

Specific topics include:

• Using thin provisioning
• Using snapshots and clones
• Managing gold volumes
• Integration with connection brokers
• Managing 1000s of volumes
• Virtual desktops and virtual machines; storage connection options
• Sizing storage (capacity and performance)
• Protecting the storage: HA, DR, and Backups
• Scaling your storage environment

	Brian Madden Independent Analyst Brianmadden.com

There are a lot of reasons people use new technology. Sometimes it offers business capability that wasn't there before. Sometimes regulatory or security requirements dictate new technologies. And sometimes (okay, most times), new technology is implemented to save money, both in the form of improved business processes and lower management costs.

The people selling VDI today typically tout its cost savings benefits. Terms like TCO, ROI, capex, and opex litter the PowerPoints.

In this conversation, Brian Madden will explore the "real" cost of VDI. He'll look at people who went down the VDI path and were very successful. He'll look at the people who went down that path and regretted it. He'll look at those who are currently trying to figure out the cost savings in their own environment.

This presentation is NOT about how to successfully implement VDI. It's not about WHERE it worked or WHY it didn't. Instead, it's all about the costs, with a focus on the "hidden" (yet very real) costs that most people don't consider until their first VDI project is behind them.

	Gary Lamb Senior Director, Data Center Virtualization INX

It’s become common knowledge about the huge cost savings, power, and other benefits resulting from data center virtualization. But, IT needs to be prepared for the resulting management challenge; the people and processes need to change to match the technology implemented in the data center. For instance, storage and network architectures change dramatically and former IT silos become much more interconnected and interdependent.

This session presents best practices for successfully migrating to, and the managing of, a virtual infrastructure.

	Jason M. Langone Director of Virtualization Services Infinite Group

Treating virtualization as a modular stack of components yields effective and flexible solutions. This session will analyze and showcase virtualization products from Microsoft, VMware, and others, working as part of a cohesive solution.
Today’s market does not support one-stop shopping for all of an organization’s virtualization needs. Recent market history portends further product diversity in the marketplace. Therefore, understanding the connections between the virtual infrastructure, application conduits, WAN acceleration, platform management, etc. are key to ensuring a robust and modular solution.

The major virtualization vendors want to use their product portfolio to solve all of their customers’ needs. Join the speaker to discuss real world examples of constructing custom environments with components from various vendors.

	Brian Duckering Senior Product Marketing Manager, Endpoint Virtualization Symantec

Virtualization technologies are being adopted in every corner of the enterprise, from server hardware to user data. In general, virtualization increases flexibility, but complicates manageability, security and access. Traditional management suites, originally designed for physical assets, tend to be less effective in virtual environments and with virtual assets. Add the growing trend toward consumerization in the enterprise, and the challenges grow. A new approach to endpoint management is required, one that recognizes that the end-user environment is of primary concern, not the underlying infrastructure, be it physical or virtual. Streaming is an established virtualization technology that can provide both the user context and the just-in-time endpoint configuration required to effectively and efficiently secure and manage the endpoints.

Understand the challenge of managing and tracking software assets in virtual environments for EULA compliance. Leverage user-based application streaming and virtualization across traditional, virtual and hybrid emerging compute models for maximum ROI, and learn about mixed model approaches for managing disaster recovery and consumerization of IT.

	Stephen Beaver Virtualization Evangelist Tripwire

What is the difference between a virtualization admin and a virtualization architect? Automation. Automation elevates your career to a more advanced level—allowing you to more effectively design and manage virtual infrastructure.

In this session you will learn best practices for incorporating automation into your daily life and how to reap the benefits of letting the little tasks (and even some of the big tasks) take care of themselves.