I’m hoping to see some of you at the VMworld Europe conference in a few weeks. This year, I have three sessions at the conference, and if you’re interested in dropping by one of them, here are the descriptions.

Hypervisor Competitive Differences: Beyond the Data Sheet
Day and Time: Wednesday February 25th at 12:15
Room: Esterel
This session offers a deep dive into core hypervisor features and looks at feature offerings far beyond what is listed on vendor data sheets. With a special focus on production-class virtualization workloads, this session details Burton Group’s recommended production-class hypervisor feature requirements in areas such as high availability, live migration, networking, storage, security, scalability, and management. Features such as live migration are not simply a checkbox; instead, the way in which live migration scales is equally important. Attendees will leave the session with detailed lists of required, preferred, and optional feature characteristics that should be in production-ready hypervisors. The feature requirements list can be used to structure RFPs when evaluating hypervisor vendor offerings.

Software Licensing in the Virtual Enterprise: Current Problems and Future Trends
Day and Time: Tuesday February 24th at 15:15
Room: Les Ambassadeurs 1
Virtual environments present new challenges for software license management across an enterprise. In this session, Burton Group senior analyst Chris Wolf breaks down the current state of software licensing and support for both server and desktop virtualization environments, 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, Symantec, and Citrix. The session concludes with guidance on how to leverage RFPs to obtain licensing and software support clarity.

Breaking Down Desktop and Application Virtualization Alternatives
Day and Time: Wednesday February 25th at 15:15
Room: Salle de Presse
Numerous methods exist for delivering applications to endpoint devices today: virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), application streaming, presentation virtualization, and hybrid approaches. The session breaks down the use cases that drive client virtualization choices and highlights future developments such as desktop hypervisors that will likely impact long term client virtualization architectures.

2/9 Update: Added session times and rooms.