PSE13: 25 Steps to Passing Your Next ESX Security Audit
Greg Shields
Virtualization optimizes your datacenter’s resources. At the same time, it adds new and challenging layers that require new tactics to properly secure. Only now is our industry catching up with formal guidance for securing and auditing the virtual environment, and its coming from places you wouldn’t expect. Pass your next security audit in 25 easy steps with the info you’ll learn from Greg Shields! He’ll share his top list of ESESX security settings that you can implement immediately, and send you packing with a reading list for your entire virtual environment.

PSE18: A Compelling Look at vSphere 4.0
Alan Sugano
vSphere 4.0 is VMware’s next release of their Hypervisor. It represents VMware’s move from a 32-bit Hypervisor in ESX 3.5 to a 64-bit Hypervisor in vSphere 4.0. The performance improvement, especially in CPU-intensive applications, is significant. In fact, you could justify the upgrade based on the improved performance alone. Besides the performance, there are a significant number of new features in vSphere. Some of the new features include:

1. vSphere Bundles
2. 64-bit Hypervisor
3. Host Profiles
4. VMKernel Protection
5. Improvements in Fault Tolerance
6. VMotion Enhancements
7. vShield Zones
8. Hot Add Support
9. Power Management
10. Thin Provisioning
11. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) Support
12. vNetwork Distributed Switch

Learn about these new features and how they can benefit your company’s virtualization IT strategy.

PSE22: Application Virtualization
Alan Sugano
End the patch management hell. Application virtualization allows you to run applications without having to install the application on each workstation. This simplifies patch management and significantly reduces the time to roll out new or upgraded applications, because patches are installed once on the application server and not individually on each workstation. We’ll take a look at Microsoft’s Softricity technology and how it handles local, remote, and disconnected clients and their applications. This technology also leads to the software as a service directive that many companies see as an industry trend. Application Virtualization also ties into Disaster Recovery because it significantly reduces the prep time for workstation recovery. Application Virtualization can reduce patch management headaches, reduce the time to roll out new applications, easily roll back problematic patches, allow users to run different versions of the same application, and speed up Disaster Recovery. See if this technology is a good fit for your company.

PSE17: Automating the Dynamic Datacenter and Creating Virtual Machines Automatically
John Savill
One of the key benefits of virtualizing the environment is a streamlined and accelerated provisioning process for operating system instances. In this session, we’ll look at what a dynamic datacenter really is and the methods and technologies we can and should be using for the creation of virtual machines in our datacenter. We’ll examine solutions from Microsoft and VMware. And in addition to just creating our virtual environment, we’ll see how to maintain the datacenter most efficiently and how to automate provisioning of virtual environments for end users.

PSE09: Best Practices for Hyper-V High-Availability
Greg Shields
Hyper-V is in version two. Now sporting the features both SMBs and enterprises need for general-purpose virtualization, Hyper-V is your cost-effective platform for your everyday workloads. But really implementing Hyper-V requires doing so with high-availability, and high-availability in Hyper-V means Windows Failover Clustering. Hyper-V and Clustering expert Greg Shields gives you the best practices for implementing Hyper-V high-availability in this deeply technical session. You’ll understand the mechanics behind clustered Hyper-V, learn smart ways to build and manage it, as well as discover why this powerful but inexpensive product makes perfect sense for today’s cost-cutting datacenters.

PSE05: Desktop Virtualization from Citrix & Microsoft
Barry Flanagan
Learn about the joint product offering from Citrix and Microsoft to deliver a cost effective VDI solution to meet your business flexibility needs. The joint VDI offering with Citrix XenDesktop and Microsoft VDI suites allows customers to deploy desktops from the datacenter, thereby delivering individual applications or complete desktops to users over the network. If you are looking for a solution that delivers an excellent centralized desktop experience for your users, leverages your existing investments in technology, as well integrates management of your physical and virtual environments, then Microsoft and Citrix have the most cost effective solution for you.

PSE19: Distributed File System: The Cheapskate’s Storage Virtualization
Sean Deuby
Microsoft’s Distributed File System provides a way to easily separate how your users access their data from where the data’s located on your network. And it needn’t cost you anything to implement it! Learn how to use it to quickly and easily build, manage, and delegate an easy to use enterprise virtual folder structure.

PSE08: ESX vs. Hyper-V
Michael Otey
Learn the differences between Hyper-V 2.0 to ESX Server 4.0 as mike explores the architecture of the two products and compares their overall feature sets. You’ll get an overall feature comparison as well as a cost comparison. You’ll also learn about the types of businesses each product is best suited for.

PSE25: Has Virtualization Decreased the Importance of SQL Backups?
Wendy Henry
So, how long does your hardware take to perform a full backup and restore of your largest SQL database? As virtualization platforms have matured, so have the underlying storage facilities smart networks employ to reap the hardware utilization and ROI benefits of virtual machines without suffering performance degradation. Many virtualization and storage platforms offer advanced snapshot and availability features that you can use to redirect users to previous versions of mission-critical data without the delays of traditional restore operations. Have these features eliminated the need for traditional backup and restore disaster recovery strategies? In this session, we’ll explore the idea of using virtual versioning and archiving in place of traditional SQL database backups to satisfy the immediate access demands of today’s business users.

PSE06: How Many Virtual Machines Can I Cram on This Box?
John Savill
In this session, we’ll examine the technologies that help achieve high virtual machine densities on your virtual infrastructure. We’ll look at features that enable memory, CPU, and disk sharing between virtual machines and how Hyper-V and VMware can help consolidate on as few virtual servers as possible without impacting guest performance.

PSE03: Live Migration Step-by-Step
Michael Otey
In this session, you’ll learn about the capabilities of Hyper-V 2.0’s Live Migration capability. You’ll learn about requisites that need to be in place to use Live Migration—and you’ll follow along on a step-by-step guide to configuring and using Live Migration.

PSE11: Managing the User Experience Across Physical and Virtual Environments
Dan Holme
As enterprises turn to virtualization, in all its forms, users begin to “roam” in ways we never imagined just a few years ago. Even if a user sits at a single physical device, their experience stretches across remote desktop sessions, virtual machines, and virtualized applications. In order to maintain, let alone improve, productivity you must ensure a consistent, manageable and supportable workspace for your users. The pieces are all there: folder redirection, user profiles, group policy, ACLs, encryption, and DFS. But the intricacies and interactions of these technologies are surprisingly complex, and until you start managing them, your IT service delivery will suffer. In this session, you will learn best practices for putting the pieces together. Participants are expected to have a solid understanding of most or all of these technologies or be ready to learn them offline. This advanced session prepares you to take away ready-to-implement, useful solutions to corralling, securing, and managing user data and settings in both physical and virtual environments.

PSE30: Microsoft Dynamic Datacenter: Delivering a Comprehensive VDI Solution
Kenon Owens
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is one of the hottest topics in IT today and is an important cornerstone of Microsoft’s Optimized desktop Strategy. For organizations to realize the full benefits of VDI they need to ensure they choose a solution that addresses the key issues they face today. This session outlines the Microsoft VDI offering and benefits of an integrated and comprehensive approach toward desktop flexibility and manageability. In this session, we will demonstrate Microsoft’s RDS Connection Broker as well as an example of a partner solution.

PSE29: Microsoft Dynamic Datacenter: It's More than Just the Hypervisor
Kenon Owens
To realize the true benefits of a virtualized solution, companies need good management. This session will demonstrate the true power and potential of a Microsoft Virtualization solution, and will show how companies can save money, increase availability, and improve agility in the datacenter. IT organizations today have applications or services they need to provide to customers with ever-changing resource demands. Microsoft’s dynamic datacenter provides a platform that responds to these needs and helps companies meet their SLAs. In this session, we will also touch on high availability and disaster recovery solutions, integrated management capabilities, and coexistence strategies for organizations, ranging from the enterprise to the midmarket and even smaller organizations. Attendees will see firsthand how Microsoft delivers a powerful platform to run business critical applications and the direction we are taking virtualization.

PSE28: Reducing Costs and Improving Application Management through Client Hosted Virtualization
Richard Ruiz
Richard Ruiz will present a technical session and demonstrations with emphasis on application, user-state, and client-hosted desktop virtualization.

Factors such as globalization, compliance, cost management, workforce mobility, and security threats create unprecedented demands on IT departments to provide the desktop infrastructure appropriate for multiple types of users. Successful companies meet these demands by turning their desktop infrastructure from a cost center to a strategic asset while, at the same time, reducing TCO, improving security and availability and organizational agility. This session will define client-side virtualization and how it can centrally manage an application’s lifecycle regardless of hosting models such as Remote Desktop Services, VDI desktops, and physical desktops. Also covered will be how to finally solve application compatibility using seamless client-hosted desktop virtualization.

PSE23: System Center Virtual Machine Manager: Real Control for Your Virtual Environment
Sean Deuby
Managing your Microsoft or VMware virtual machines presents a different set of challenges than managing physical servers. Virtual systems move around on different physical hosts, they can be quickly provisioned or de-provisioned, their large disk images present unique management, security, and performance challenges…the list goes on. Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) is designed to handle all these challenges of managing virtual system from both Microsoft and VMware, from workgroup-sized configurations to full enterprise deployments. Check out this session to learn how to quickly begin using SCVMM to manage your virtual environment.

PSE14: Understanding Virtualization Technologies
Michael Otey
Virtualization encompasses a virtual maze of technologies. Let Mike lead you through the maze as he explains the different types of virtualization. You’ll learn about the difference in desktop and server virtualization as well as application virtualization. You’ll also where each of today’s popular products fits in.

PSE07: VDI Showdown: Best Solutions for Desktop Virtualization
Greg Shields
VMware has high-end features, but with high-end costs. Microsoft provides general-purpose virtualization atop the licenses you already have. Citrix leans on decades of experience with an open-source hypervisor. With all the options out there, what makes a good desktop virtualization solution? Find out in this 75-minute showdown with virtualization gurus Greg Shields and Don Jones. They’ll outline the features and the failures in each of the products, including a few you might not be aware of, and send you with a checklist for your next VDIDI project. Bring questions and leave with smart answers in this high-powered desktop virtualization line-up.

PSE01: Virtualization and Security
Steve Riley
Securing an environment composed of virtual servers and clients presents certain distinct challenges, but it doesn’t require you to throw away everything you already know. Virtualiztion follows a noticable trend in the evolution of computing technologies; being aware of this helps us understand how to ensure that virtualized environments aren’t suddenly vulnerable to attacks. Virtualization makes certain security-related tasks easier and more cost-effective, like application testing and deploying honeypots. Securing virtualized resources builds on the experience you already have and requires a few additional things to consider. Steve Riley will explore these topics and also examine security technologies deployed by Amazon Web Services in its implemention of the Xen hypervisor used in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud.

PSE26: Virtualization in Business Continuity
Gaetan Castelein
As you know, virtualization technologies are being relied on more and more for disaster recovery and business continuity, and vendors are building these capabilities into their server virtualization solutions. In this session, we’ll discuss this in more depth from a technological perspective—the obstacles and the benefits — as well as from the business perspective — the business benefits of deploying a business continuity solution within your virtualized infrastructure vs. going a more traditional way.

PSE27: Virtualization Management
Neela Jacques
As data centers become more virtualized, the level of complexity grows, and with it the need for efficient and effective management technologies that can adapt and react quickly to both the physical and virtual data movement. In this session, we’ll explore why these management technologies are crucial and why they are crucial now.

PSE04: Virtualization of Exchange Server 2010 Architecture
Michael Noel
The advantages of server virtualization are significant and many organizations have been making the move toward virtualization of core components in their infrastructure, including Exchange Server. Virtualizing Exchange Server has certain significant challenges, however, and it is important to understand how to properly scale a virtualization environment to handle the unique requirements of Exchange. The latest version of Exchange Server provides for key virtualization advantages such as lowered Disk IO, multiple database copies using Database Access Groups (DAGs), and other enhancements that change the virtualization design paradigm. This session focuses on real-world best practice architectural guidance for virtualizing an Exchange Server environment, with particular focus on Exchange Server 2010 server roles and architecture. Real-world virtualized Exchange Server 2010 designs and deployments of varying sizes are discussed and compared.

• Understand how and when to virtualize Exchange Server 2010 server roles and components.
• Determine the best virtualized Exchange Server architecture for your environment.
• Learn the caveats, risks, and challenges that may be encountered in a virtualized Exchange environment.

PSE24: Virtualization of SharePoint 2010 Farm Architecture
Michael Noel
Server virtualization technologies have taken front stage recently and many organizations have begun to replace physical servers, including SharePoint servers, with virtualized machines. Virtualization of the 2007 wave of SharePoint products and technologies has been supported for some time, and many 2007 farms have been successfully virtualized over the years. With a new version of SharePoint, however, comes new best practices and new techniques for virtualization of SharePoint. This session focuses specifically on SharePoint Server 2010 farm virtualization and how components of a SharePoint 2010 environment can be successfully virtualized. Included in the discussion are new virtualization High Availability options such as Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Live Migration of SharePoint guest sessions as well as time-tested design architecture examples using integrated SharePoint failover techniques.

• Learn the best practices for virtualizing the new architectural elements of a SharePoint 2010 farm.
• Examine real-world designs of virtualized SharePoint farms of varying sizes and functions.
• Understand how to properly size a SharePoint environment by reviewing real-world sizing guidelines for virtual hosts, guests, server and storage infrastructure.

PSE02: Virtualization, Where Should We Add Availability?
John Savill
As the support for virtualizing applications and services become standard, leading to more of an organization’s infrastructure being virtualized, decisions have to be made as to the best manner to keep these virtualized payloads highly available. At the virtualization layer we have high availability technologies such as Live Migration and Failover Clustering but we can also enable high availability within the guest operating systems for services and applications that support high availability. Which should we use, should we use both together, and when? In this session, we walk through the various availability options and give best practice guidance on the right way to make your virtualized environment highly available.

PSE12: Virtualization’s Role in Disaster Recovery
Alan Sugano
A comprehensive Disaster Recovery Plan is something that every company should have and hopefully will never have to use. Having a plan in place that provided a road map to recovery was adequate in the past, but recent emphasis has been placed on the speed of the recovery. Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance companies must disclose their business continuity plans and the company’s exposure to a prolonged outage and how it affects financial reporting. Virtualization can significantly reduce the recovery time for a major disaster, by providing a warm or hot remote recovery site and accelerating workstation and server setup.

PSE15: Virtualizing Your Active Directory Forest
Sean Deuby
Virtualization is all the rage today. Can you apply virtualization to the critical infrastructure of your Active Directory forest? When does it make sense, and when should you leave it alone? Learn how to safely virtualize your domain controllers, understand security and recovery concerns, and apply virtualization to cheaply enable advanced domain recovery capabilities.

PSE16: VMware: Performance Tuning and Configuration
Alan Sugano
This session will provide tips on how to get the most performance out of your ESX Hosts and Virtual Machine (VM) Guests. This session will cover ESX Versions, Host Hardware Considerations (Memory, CPU, Disk and Network Cards), SANs and Virtual Machine Considerations (Operating Systems, Applications, Single or Multiple CPUs?, Memory and Networking). Many of the performance turning tweaks on physical servers still apply in the virtual world, but with some specific twists. Make sure you're getting the best performance possible out of your VMs by optimizing your virtual server environment.

PSE21: vSphere vs. System Center
Michael Otey
Come to this session to learn how vSphere compares with Microsoft’s System Center. You’ll get an overall feature comparison as well as seeing how each product addresses different management concerns in the organization.

KEYNOTE SESSION

KEYNOTE: Microsoft Virtualization and Management: Delivering Datacenter Services in the Real World
Edwin Yuen
Learn from those responsible for driving change how datacenters operate, using technologies such as virtualization, automation, and service-level management. In this session, Edwin Yuen, one of Microsoft’s virtualization experts, will discuss the future of datacenter operations. Questions addressed will include: Have key technologies really reduced costs? What has been the real impact to the business? How do we deal with new expectations caused by delivery models such as cloud computing?

KEYNOTE: Stepping into the Cloud
Steve Riley
Virtualization is one of the many key components of cloud computing. Indeed, without mature virtualization technologies and practices, cloud computing wouldn’t be what it is today. And it’s here to stay: unlike the application service provider days of the late 1990s, cloud computing is already changing the way many organizations store, process, and distribute information. Yet many other IT shops remain wary. Moving computers and storage out of your own data center and into someone else’s, mingled among many others, seems daunting at first. Common questions arise around security, manageability, performance, and reliability. Think about it, though—these are the same concerns you’ve always had. Nothing about the cloud requires that you jettison everything you’ve learned during your career. The cloud is a logical next step in the evolution of computing, and when integrated with corporate IT, removes much of the burden and allows a business to concentrate on its core functions. Steve Riley will introduce typical cloud architectures, explore common concerns, dispel several myths, discuss how to "think cloud," and help you learn how your business can benefit from the cloud.

KEYNOTE: VMware Virtualization
Jack Lo
Virtualization has become a staple of IT organizations, enabling businesses to reduce their IT costs through increased efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness. This keynote session will discuss how virtualization continues to simplify IT, but also illustrate how virtualization increasingly provides a platform and solutions for increased application availability, business continuity, and disaster recovery.

PARTNER TRACK

PARTNER03: Understanding the Storage "Must-Haves" for Virtualization Success
Adam Fore
Virtualization technologies enable an extremely cost-effective and flexible infrastructure from the data center to the desktop. Storage is an essential part of the infrastructure and can greatly limit or enhance the impact of virtualization, in terms of realizing business objectives. Attend this session to see how rapid storage provisioning, dynamic creation and movement of VM, and more – unique capabilities that amplify the benefits of virtualization. In this session, you’ll learn how to:

• Provide a single pane-of-glass to manage your server and storage infrastructure
• Use 50% less storage in your virtualized environments
• Make storage as flexible as virtual servers or desktops to boost your business agility