If you’ll be in or near Atlanta on December 3rd, you may want to consider dropping by the free Burton Group virtualization seminar, being held from 1-4 at the Georgia Power Company. Richard Jones and I will be presenting. Here’s a description of the sessions.

Regardless of whether you have a mature virtualization deployment or are just starting down the path toward virtualization, this seminar will have something for you. In three fast-paced hours, Richard and Chris will break down today’s most pressing management challenges found in the most popular VMware, Microsoft, and Xen-based virtualization platforms, while also detailing new ways to look at high availability in the virtual infrastructure.

Best Practices in Managing Virtual Infrastructure (Chris Wolf)
Virtual machine (VM) mobility and orchestration are key elements of the dynamic data center, but not all organizations are ready and willing to turn the keys to their data centers over to a set of orchestration tools. Several technical and non-technical pitfalls influence VM mobility, including: network and storage connectivity and isolation requirements, server hardware, service level requirements, security requirements, and software licensing. This session will take a practical look at the current approaches and hazards that exist when managing the virtual infrastructure as it relates to data center automation. Along the way, attendees will be presented with tools, tips, and scripts that can be leveraged to optimize management of the virtual data center.

New Trends in Virtual Environment High Availability (Richard Jones)
Virtualization continues to spread through enterprise IT like wild fire. More and more critical workloads are being virtualized resulting in a greater number of business critical processes running on a given physical server, in turn demanding higher availability for those systems. High availability solutions for virtual environments are in various stages of maturity and development throughout the industry. Richard will review the best practices for building highly available virtual environments and will discuss the progress, or lack thereof, in high and continuous availability solutions and their management.

Software Licensing Exposed: The State of Licensing for Virtual Environments (Chris Wolf)
Virtual environments present new challenges for software license management across an enterprise. In this session, Chris breaks down the current state of server virtualization licensing and support amongst the vendor community, while highlighting the technical elements of the virtual infrastructure that impact product licensing. He will also describe the licensing and support model best suited for modern virtualization platforms, with examples of vendors that provide best-in-class virtualization licensing policies today. All major enterprise application and OS vendors will be covered, including Microsoft, Sun, Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, HP, IBM, CA, SAP, BEA, Symantec, and Citrix.

RSVP required: Email or call Laura Turgeon at 603-652-7125.