I submitted four proposals for this year’s VMworld conference and learned that three of them are up for voting. I think the fourth is in a VMworld black hole. I wasn’t notified that it was accepted and it’s not up for voting either. I guess I’ll know soon enough… If you’re curious, that proposed session was titled “Private Cloud Security: Vendor Secrets and Hypervisor Competitive Differences.”

Anyway, if you’re not tired of my jokes and would like to see more of me at VMworld North America or VMworld Europe, you can vote for my sessions online. Note that you will need to register for a VMworld.com account if you don’t have one already.

Here are the descriptions of my sessions that are up for voting.

Server-hosted Virtual Desktops: What the Vendors Aren’t Telling You

Many organizations are beginning to implement or plan server-hosted virtual desktop solutions. Vendor platform assessments in the emerging client virtualization market are often difficult due to a lack of defined acceptable standards. In this session, Burton senior analyst Chris Wolf and analyst Simon Bramfitt share Burton Group’s benchmark for evaluating server-hosted virtual desktop solutions, including criteria for evaluating a solution’s deployment, management, performance, integration, and user experience capabilities. The session concludes with a breakdown and scorecards of popular vendor solutions, including the current Citrix and VMware products.

Simon Bramfitt and I will repeat and expand on our session from Citrix Synergy and will include analysis of Microsoft VDI and Quest vWorkspace in addition to VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop. If time permits we will assess more products too. You can vote for this session here. If you search for “Simon Bramfitt” you will find the session. I’m note sure why my name isn’t listed, but assume the voting system only accommodates one speaker.

Extreme Makeover: Data Protection Edition

Applying legacy data protection architectures to today’s heavily virtualized modern data center comes at a significant price in terms of both performance and consolidation density. We are at a time where organizations should reevaluate existing data protection practices and leverage new technologies to improve data recovery and lessen or eliminate the performance tax posed by many existing data protection architectures. This session breaks down modern VM data protection solutions, including VMware’s vStorage API for Data Protection, array-level snapshots and replication, and third party enterprise backup software solutions. Attendees will be exposed to common data protection pitfalls as well as successful blueprints for modern VMware data protection architectures. Chris Wolf has been architecting data protection solutions for enterprise virtualization environments since 2002 and includes an abundance of lessons learned and best practices drawn from real world implementations in this session.

You can vote for this session here.

Cloud Futures: The Infrastructure Authority

To realize the potential of private cloud, infrastructure must be capable of not just dynamically provisioning and optimizing systems, but also not violating any security, regulatory, or organizational policy constraints in the process. In many enterprise environments, dynamic IT consists of several disjointed solutions and oftentimes blind faith that policy, security, or regulatory constraints will not be broken. The bottom line – someone has to be in charge. The infrastructure authority (IA) is the future nerve center of cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) operations. Among the many roles the IA possesses are:

• Provides a central metadata store
• Leverages common data models to request or offer services
• Maintains physical, virtual, and policy dependency maps
• Ensures security and regulatory compliance
• Ensures that service level requirements are met
• Stores and enforces organizational policy
• Ensures accurate capacity forecasts
• Integrates with third party management and orchestration tools to authorize IT operations such as provisioning or relocation before they proceed

Typical questions answered by the IA include:

• Are security zoning rules checked before live migrating a VM?
• Do any policy restrictions prevent VMs from migrating to different data centers or to public cloud infrastructure?

This session takes a practical look at the emerging role of the IA, and details how existing management frameworks such as VMware vCenter and industry standards such as OVF can be used in this capacity moving forward.

You can vote for this session here.