Burton Group Sessions at VMworld 2009

The Data Center Strategies team will be pretty busy at VMworld this year. In addition to our sessions, Burton Group has a booth in the Solutions Exchange. Feel free to drop by and talk shop with one of our analysts. The booth will be manned with experts that cover virtualization, storage, compute platforms, power and cooling, and management. Burton Group also has four sessions at the conference. If you’re interested, here are the details.

EA2442 - Software Licensing in the Virtual Enterprise: Current Problems and Future Trends (Tuesday, 3:00 PM, Hall E 135)
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.

TA2400: Hypervisor Competitive Differences: What the Vendors Aren’t Telling You (Tuesday, 4:00 PM, Espanade 305)
In this session, Chris Wolf and Richard Jones 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, and Citrix) and will leave with a list of pointed questions to ask prospective hypervisor vendors regarding their current solutions and future plans. Vendor scorecards will also be presented, allowing attendees to see how each major hypervisor ranks against Burton Group’s enterprise production-class hypervisor evaluation criteria. Areas where hypervisors fall short of production readiness will be clearly highlighted as well.

BC2541 - Re-architecting Backup and Recovery for Virtual Environments: Best Practices (Wednesday, 4:00 PM, Espanade 301)
Server virtualization is one of the fundamental building blocks of the dynamic data center and with it brings new management challenges, especially in the area of data protection and recovery. Existing data protection architectures may provide a short term serviceable solution, but lack the scalability to be a mainstay in tomorrow’s data center. Continued data growth is also compounding data protection complexity, as enterprises must accommodate data growth by increasing backup system performance in order to stay within backup windows for data protection. 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 Consolidated Backup (VCB), array-level snapshots, 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.

DV2439 - Breaking Down Desktop Virtualization Alternatives (Thursday, 9:30 AM, Espanade 301)
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.

Comments

[Howard Dyckoff]

I was unable to register for the Burton session comparing virtualization vendors.

Is there a summary of the report available or will the slides be posted on the VMWorld site??

BTW. I agree that there should be a vendor neutral Virtualiztion conference. There are many small venues trying to leading Cloud computing conferences, but none so far have the depth and breadth needed

RE:

TA2400: Hypervisor Competitive Differences: What the Vendors Aren’t Telling You (Tuesday, 4:00 PM, Espanade 305)
In this session, Chris Wolf and Richard Jones 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, and Citrix) ....

[Drue Reeves]

Hi Howard,

Thanks for the comment. I don't know if the slides are available from the VMworld site, but we've been passing out this information to customers in exchange for contact information (for sales purposes). Email me and I'll see what we can do.

Drue Reeves
VP, Research Director
Data Center Strategies