This year’s Catalyst North America conference is in San Diego from July 27-31. With the speaker lineup all set, I thought it would be a good time to share more conference details. This year we have 2 1/2 days of cloud and virtualization coverage, with a special focus on architecture, performance, management integration, and security. The conference is providing extensive coverage of server and desktop virtualization, while highlighting practical steps to take on the path toward building an internal cloud. Our presenters will be deep diving on a number of important topics. For example, Microsoft’s Mark Russinovich is going to be talking about how developers need to start thinking differently when it comes to writing applications to run in virtual environments. Virtualization is becoming the default platform for many x86 applications, and applications can run better in virtual environments when they’re written to more efficiently use resources (i.e. memory) and to take advantage of dynamically added virtual hardware. And that’s just the start. When it comes to cloud and cloud architecture, we have some of the brightest minds in the business (Steve Herrod - VMware CTO, Mark Templeton - Citrix CEO, Bret Hartman - RSA CTO, and Andrew Hillier - CiRBA CTO) offering perspective on the future as well as practical steps to take in the present. Simon Crosby (Citrix CTO) and Scott Drummonds (VMware Product Manager) will debate performance in the Thrilla in California. Our client virtualization track is also backed by excellent speakers and two very good customer case studies. If you can’t tell, I’m pretty excited about the conference. I’ve included descriptions of some of the sessions I’ll be attending below, and you can see a complete list of all sessions here. Registration is still open and you can register for the conference here.

Building the Datacenter of the Future
Stephen Herrod Senior, Vice President of R&D and Chief Technology Officer - 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 how you can transform your datacenter into internal clouds and seamlessly leverage reliable cloud providers within the private cloud. 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.

Server Virtualization: Growing Complexity and Vendor Inconvenient Truths
Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst - Burton Group
The server virtualization keynote examines the growing complexity of today’s virtual infrastructures, along with the future trends that impact current architectural decisions. “Internal cloud” is not the latest marketing buzzword, but rather a serious data center architectural framework. This session unveils Burton Group’s position on server virtualization’s role in the internal cloud and highlights a reference architecture for a cloud-based virtualized infrastructure. Numerous technical and nontechnical pitfalls, along with vendor misrepresentations, prevent wholesale dynamic data center orchestration today. Those issues will be clearly highlighted in this session. Key takeaways include:

• Details of Burton Group’s internal cloud reference architecture - the result of extensive vendor and customer collaboration.
• A special focus on the growing list of management pitfalls, troubleshooting complexity, future management trends, and practical advice on what can be done today to effectively manage the virtual infrastructure.
• Dissection of vendor hype and an emphasis on architecture and steps to take now to optimize virtual infrastructure operations and management.

Enterprise IT, the Cloud and Virtualization: Putting It all Together
Mark Templeton, CEO - Citrix Systems, Inc.
Today’s business environment is forcing the enterprise computing model to evolve at an accelerated pace, moving toward a hybrid approach that balances installed software, with SaaS offerings that live in the cloud, while providing superior application performance over all network connections and appropriately leveraging in-demand technologies such as virtualization.  Enterprise IT departments are challenged like never before to offer a full spectrum of services at a lower cost, and to meet the growing requirements of users whose expectations have been set by increasingly sophisticated yet easy-to-use consumer technologies.  Come hear Mark Templeton share his vision about:

• How virtualization - across desktops, servers and applications - fits in to the new model of IT and realistic implementation scenarios
• Why cloud services are not a threat to IT, which services can be incorporated into the model today, and what areas are not yet ready for prime time
• The need for IT to move beyond the current distributed computing model to one that embraces virtualization and cloud computing to help them better meet changing business needs and deliver a simpler and more efficient computing experience

Case Study: Enterprise Virtualization on an SMB Budget
Matt Lavallee, Director of Technology - MLS Property Information Network, Inc.
Virtualization has a long history in IT, but only recently have the tools, resources, and complimentary hardware become broadly available. While traditional enterprises are able to commit significant resources to understanding this wealth of new technology and designing fresh infrastructure, making virtualization practical for the small and medium business (SMB) or branch office is a greater challenge. In addition, limited IT resources underscore the need to automate as many IT processes as possible. This session reviews options in hardware, software, networking, and storage that create a compelling TCO story on a limited budget. Along the way, session attendees will see an innovative approach that leverages virtualization, storage replication, and IT process automation to deploy a resilient web services infrastructure across multiple sites.

New Trends in Application and OS Development for the Virtualized Data Center
Mark Russinovich, Technical Fellow -Microsoft
The ever-increasing requirements of virtualization performance, security and availability continue to drive the evolution of operating systems, both as a host and as a client. For example, most current virtualization hosts take advantage of second-level page table hardware support to minimize the memory overhead of client virtual machines and the performance costs of transitions between a client and the hypervisors. Newer technologies like IOMMU/VT-d allow for devices to be assigned to virtual machines, but bring with them challenges that operating systems must address around machine migration. Applications in the data center also face challenges brought on by virtualization, such as the need to be hardware-agnostic and be adaptive to changing system capabilities in the face of rapid provisioning, virtual machine over-commit, and virtual machine migration. Attendees will leave the session with a list of key development practices for virtual environments that developers should be doing today. Key areas explored include:

• Secure launch for hypervisors and virtual machines
• Virtual machine device assignment
• Operating system and application state management
• Best practices for virtualized application memory management
• Summary of development techniques that negatively impact applications running in virtual environments

The Thrilla in California: Debating Hypervisor Performance
Simon Crosby, CTO Server Virtualization and Management - Citrix Systems; Scott Drummonds, Group Manager, Technical Marketing - VMware, Inc.
For the past 2 ½ years, Citrix and VMware have used the blogosphere as their virtual sparring ground for a debate on hypervisor performance. While each vendor has contributed a wealth of information on virtual infrastructure performance to the online community, both continue to passionately disagree on how their respective hypervisors stand up to enterprise-class production workloads, as well as how best to measure performance in virtual environments. In this debate, VMware and Citrix have offered their most knowledgeable and passionate voices in the realm of virtual infrastructure performance: Simon Crosby (CTO - Citrix) and Scott Drummonds (Manager, Technical Marketing – VMware). In this fast-paced debate, come to hear both vendors take off the gloves and get to the bottom of where their hypervisors stand with regards to performance. Attendees will have an opportunity to provide questions for the debaters, and the following topics will also be addressed:

• Technical nuances that offer the greatest performance benefit/detriment to VMware and Xen hypervisors
• Effective methods for measuring hypervisor performance
• Barriers to performance scalability

Hypervisor Competitive Differences: What the Vendors Aren’t Telling You
Richard Jones, Vice President and Service Director - Burton Group
Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst - Burton Group
In this session, Richard Jones and Chris Wolf dissect 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, and Virtual Iron) and will leave with a list of pointed questions to ask prospective hypervisor vendors regarding their current solutions and future plans. Attendees with leave this session with:

• Server virtualization hypervisor feature lists that can be used to create RFP documents.
• Details that differentiate data sheet marketing checkboxes from production-ready feature implementations.
• Examples of product shortcomings and vendor feature misrepresentations.

Security Strategies for Cloud Computing
Dan Blum, Senior Vice President and Principal Analyst - Burton Group
Cloud computing represents a disruptive opportunity for organizations to leverage internet-based IT service delivery. As part of the “externalization of IT” cloud computing forces organizations to craft security strategies for protecting data and processes that have moved to service provider environments. Audit and monitoring measures must be increased to make up for loss of control, but along the way organizations must explore new technology architectures and navigate tricky legal and compliance issues. In this session, Principal Analyst Dan Blum will cover:

• Business, financial, legal, compliance, reputational, operational, and strategic risks of cloud computing
• Developing a security policy
• Identity management, de-provisioning, and federation in the cloud context
• The role of virtualization
• Audit services and strategies
• What to expect from vendors

External Clouds vs. Internal Virtualization: Determining Where to Draw the Line by Analyzing Candidates and Crunching the Numbers
Andrew Hillier, CTO & Co-Founder - CiRBA
Identifying candidates for cloud computing is not as simple as it may first seem.  By comparing cloud options to existing physical hosting scenarios it is easy to see reduced costs, but the real benchmark for comparison lies with the virtualization of existing infrastructure.  This session will outline how to analyze environments in order to first qualify candidates for the cloud or virtualization based on a number of business, configuration and utilization considerations.  For example, sensitive data, regulatory requirements, or utilization patterns and personalities all impact whether or not applications are suitable for the cloud.  Once suitable candidates are identified, a rigorous analysis that examines factors including SLA requirements, costs and break-even points, operational windows, and utilization personalities and patterns, will enable organizations to fully understand the potential of cloud alternatives.   Also, advanced capacity management concepts, such as dynamically “right-sizing” workloads onto the most economical cloud instances based on operational patterns and windows, will be discussed.

Key takeaways from this session include:

• How to identify whether a workload is best suited for in-house virtualization, the cloud or remaining on physical servers
• How to analyze the cost implications of cloud vs. internal virtualization
• How to analyze and apply related management strategies for workloads in the cloud in order to meet availability and financial requirements

Security, Audit, and Compliance in Virtual Environments
Trent Henry, Principal Analyst - Burton Group
As organizations deploy virtual infrastructure at a furious pace, they enhance the responsiveness of IT to business requirements. At the same time they cause considerable head scratching among security teams and auditors. In a world already grappling with changing perimeters, virtualization makes the question “How is data controlled?” even more poignant. This session will present Burton Group’s recent research on security and attestation in such environments. It provides recommendations for strong security and audit practices that don’t sacrifice the advantages of the dynamic data center.

Building a Secure Virtualized Data Center Platform for the Cloud
Bret Hartman, CTO - RSA Security Inc.
Escalating the development of deeper layers of security for the cloud now will help avoid repeating what transpired with the Internet, another evolving and massive infrastructure where the need for inherent security was not foreseen. Virtualized infrastructures provide tremendous flexibility by supporting mobility of virtual machines (VMs). With mobility come challenges to visibility and control of VM-based applications, as well as potential vulnerabilities such as theft of the VM contents or unauthorized modification of VMs.

This session will discuss solutions that are relevant for applications that are within the dynamic data center as well as for cloud deployments, including improved visibility into the administration of VMs, encryption protection of VMs, and content-based network control mechanisms.  We will discuss ways to embed security within the virtual infrastructure layer to provide pervasive, non-bypassable enforcement in a way that is impossible to implement in the physical world.

Client Virtualization: Are We There Yet?
Richard Jones, Vice President and Service Director - Burton Group
The client virtualization keynote explores this market space separating hype from reality.  In this session, Richard Jones will outline the various technologies that make what client virtualization is today and what is yet to come.  Client virtualization has yet to mature to a complete solution with vendor products offering a road filled with potholes and obstacles on the way to a valuable solution.  In this session you will learn:

• The components that make up a complete client virtualization solution
• The differentiation between virtual desktops, application and presentation virtualization, and how they complement each other
• Where we are today and what you should demand of vendors
• The answer to the question: “When should I jump on the client virtualization bandwagon?”

Building the Business Case for VDI
Derek Niedermayer, Network Support Supervisor/IT - McHenry Savings Bank
While desktop PCs might be inexpensive to acquire, their lifecycle support costs – from IT manpower to energy – are high. By moving the CPU, memory, drivers, and desktop software including the OS to the server, zero-client desktop virtualization reduces IT complexity and cost while helping to eliminating the PC as a security risk.

McHenry Savings of Illinois is a full service financial institution with a complete line of deposit and loan products. With four banking locations and over 100 full-time employees, McHenry Savings provides customers with personal and business loans, refinancing, free checking, home equity loans, mortgages, 24-hour online banking and much more. With more than 100 workstations and an IT department of two, McHenry Savings chose to virtualize their desktops with Pano Virtual Desktop Solution (VDS) in August 2008 in order to replace their outdated PCs, decrease the client footprint at the workstation and improve desktop management. Since deployment, McHenry has experienced cost savings with the initial workstation purchase, a reduction in software licensing costs, a decrease in the amount of time spent building desktops (from a day to a couple of hours), a reduction in the time spent by IT fixing workstation issues (from hours to minutes) and a significant savings in electricity cost – McHenry estimates they will save $23,000 over the next three years by using Pano VDS instead of traditional PCs.

This session will delve into the business issues McHenry wanted to solve with desktop virtualization as well as the deployment, benefits and future roadmap of Pano VDS at McHenry Savings. It will also review desktop virtualization best practices and where organizations should begin before adopting a solution.

VDI on a Large Scale from Business Case to Support
Brian Cox, Director, IT Customer Service - Norton Healthcare
What happens when you’re faced with applications that perform poorly in terminal services, you have a huge investment in thin client technology, and users want more applications and data at their fingertips? VDI might be the answer to all your problems, but you must understand the practical application of the technology. A large scale deployment of desktops can take numerous employees countless hours as well as user disruption adding to an already large expense. In this session, you will learn how Norton Healthcare justified and accomplished a large scale move to a VDI environment based on VMware’s View solutions.  The practical approach and process plus the benefits achieved will be outlined.

Desktop Virtualization - Five Years Forward
Sumit Dhawan, Vice President, Desktop Virtualization - Citrix Systems
Interest in taking the virtualization technologies from the servers to the client remains extremely high. Customers have choice to pick different technologies - Terminal Services-based presentation virtualization, hosted virtual desktop or VDI, desktop streaming, or blade PCs. And, enterprises will soon have access to client hypervisors and local virtual machines. All of these solutions address the same fundamental desktop management challenges: manageability, security and cost - but they each have different strengths. Meanwhile, end users are holding desktops to an increasingly high standard of performance, flexibility and availability, regardless whether they are virtual or physical.

In this session we will discuss:

• The pivotal impact of the next five years on the future of the desktop
• Which virtualization technologies will flourish and why
• How organizations like yours are using these solutions today and their plans for the future
• What actions you need to take to prepare for the impending desktop evolution

Desktop Virtualization: The New Kid in Town for Endpoint Security
Dan Blum, Senior Vice President and Principal Analyst - Burton Group
Desktop support costs and threats of malware have long bedeviled organizations as they seek to keep IT budgets and information security risks contained. The problem is particularly acute when IT does not control the endpoint, or must yield local administrative privileges to users. Desktop virtualization has emerged as a compelling option for endpoint security and manageability. This session will address the following questions:

• What are the protection benefits and residual risks of desktop virtualization?
• How mature are the vendor solutions?
• What are the best practices to improve end to end desktop virtualization security?

Starting Over: New Management Trends for the Virtualized Desktop
Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst - Burton Group
Virtualizing desktop delivery while sticking to traditional desktop OS and application management tools negates many of the TCO benefits associated with client virtualization. This session takes a practical look at how to transition desktop management from the physical to virtual world, while highlighting the tools, best practices, and pitfalls that have the greatest impact on management in the virtualized desktop world. Session highlights include:

• The impact of client virtualization architecture, hypervisor, network, and storage choices on desktop management.
• Desktop deployment and lifecycle management techniques.
• Leveraging streaming technologies to simplify application and OS maintenance.
• Top-down (application stack) vs. bottom-up (storage stack) approaches to application and OS rollouts and updates.