Chris Wolf

I have three sessions at this year’s VMworld North America conference and thought I would post them here in the event you’re interested in attending one of them. Each session will run two times, and the session descriptions, times, and locations are listed below. I hope to see you at the conference. The in-depth discussions I have with fellow attendees has always been one of my favorite parts of the conference.

Server-Hosted Virtual Desktops: What the Vendors Aren’t Telling You (DV8044)
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, Gartner Research VP Chris Wolf shares Gartner’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 VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, and Quest Software products.

Session times:

• Tuesday August 31st, 2:00, Moscone South 302
• Thursday September 2nd, 10:30, Moscone West 2003

Private Cloud Security: Vendor Secrets and Hypervisor Competitive Differences (SE8098)
When it comes to building a private cloud or sizing up public cloud providers, hypervisor choice heavily influences security. In this session, attendees will see side-by-side differences in the security architectures of VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer hypervisors. Emphasis will be placed on the capabilities of each solution to monitor and enforce organizational security policy within the virtual infrastructure, along with the ability of each solution to securely host multi-tenant environments. Attendees will leave this session with pointed questions to ask vendors regarding architectural deficiencies in their platforms, along with a detailed list of industry best practices to securely build private cloud infrastructure.

Session times:

• Wednesday September 1st, 1:30, Moscone South 301
• Wednesday September 1st, 4:30, Moscone South 301

Cloud Futures: The Infrastructure Authority (MA8092)
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.

Session times:

• Tuesday August 31st, 5:00, Moscone South 302
• Wednesday September 1st, 3:00, Moscone West 2002

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Category: Client Virtualization Cloud Server Virtualization     Tags: citrix, microsoft, vmware, vmworld

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