Track Chair: Anne Skamarock
Research Director
Focus Consulting
Track Chair: Barb Goldworm
President and Chief Analyst
Focus Consulting
Is your company taking full advantage of the advanced benefits of virtualization 2.0—automation, dynamic workload balancing, high availability and IT optimization? Are you leveraging the latest virtualization tools and techniques for life cycle management, capacity and performance monitoring/and management, chargeback and policy-based management? Are you properly safeguarding and securing your virtual platforms? Are you integrating your traditional management toolset with your new virtual ones? This virtualization management track is geared for the advanced virtualization professional to offer information and insights into effectively managing and optimizing the new virtual infrastructure.
As virtualization implementation progress, the key to realizing the full potential of virtual infrastructures is though advanced management and automation. This session is a primer on advanced management capabilities such as dynamic workload balancing, high availability, disaster recovery, capacity and performance management, and automated policy-based workflows. It will discuss the value of implementing advanced management features and describe the landscape of solution vendors, from start-ups to long-time industry leaders.
While many turn to virtualization as a cost-saving solution, the increase in the number of processes to manage virtualization may result in additional and higher costs. This session will explain how automating processes around virtualization helps reduce management costs and increase productivity, while enforcing compliant best practices aimed at improving performance and availability of all critical business applications. Finally, the session will describe how automation of virtual management tasks such as provisioning, configuration, monitoring and maintenance can ensure that consistency and standardization are extended to virtual servers alongside physical machines.
Todd DeLaughter is currently the President and CEO of Opalis. Prior to Opalis, Todd was vice president and general manager of the $1 billion OpenView Business Unit at HP where his responsibility for strategy and business planning, acquisitions, strategic partner relationships, operations, solutions marketing, research and development all contributed to this business doubling in size during his tenure and achieving growth at two times the market rate. Before joining HP, he spent 18 years with Compaq, leading and working in software teams. DeLaughter is a former advisory board member of the TeleManagement Forum and of NetMan, a Copenhagen, Denmark-based wholly-owned HP company specializing in provisioning products and services for the network service provider market.
It used to take months to provision a server; now it takes minutes. This provides IT with greater agility to respond to new requests, but has also created a new problem called virtual server sprawl. "Need another server? Sure, here you go!" - as quick as that. However, virtual server sprawl eats up resources - such as the Central Processing Unit (CPU), Memory and especially storage resources. Tools and techniques for avoiding and managing server sprawl will be discussed in this session.
Virtualization is great, but the business application is king! Getting your virtual infrastructure to perform optimally is essential to meeting application service levels. This requires performance monitoring and management; capacity management and chargeback; and troubleshooting tools that successfully navigate the complexities of the entire virtual infrastructure including servers, storage and networking. This session introduces some of the ways IT can address application performance and capacity management across the virtual infrastructure.
Before x86 virtualization, network switches provided a secure perimeter to the data center. When IT organizations implement virtualization, some switches move from physical perimeter devices to virtual switches inside a physical server. This shift is an example of the new paradigm of security within a virtual infrastructure. In addition, virtualization introduces new attack surfaces and a swath of new risks. As we embrace virtualization, we must strategically approach security from the start.
It is prudent to secure all infrastructures, virtual ones included. But how does the addition of a virtualization software layer affect securing the entire infrastructure from the application through the hardware? This session will explore the issues around securing a virtual infrastructure and highlight some of the tools available to assist with securing the entire environment.
There is a great deal of activity in the market around virtual infrastructure management, from both virtualization vendors and point-product vendors. When building a long-term virtualization management strategy, it is helpful to have a sense of the long-term directions of these key virtualization and management players. This session discusses what to expect on the virtual management front going forward. Come hear where the market leaders are going with virtualization management—from the desktop to the cloud.
