8:30AM Keynote Presentation: “Virtualization 360”

Dan Stolts & John Kelbley, Microsoft

Rooms A, B, C

The keynote by Dan Stolts and John Kelbley will set the stage for the entire day. In addition to being the President of the Virtualization Boston User Group, Dan is an IT-Pro Evangelist for Microsoft here in the Northeast. As part of the keynote, Dan will welcome us all and set the stage for the day’s event. Dan and John will then jointly keynote to detail Microsoft’s “Virtualization 360” view of the entire spectrum for all of the virtualization technologies out in the marketplace.

Get caught up on where we have come in virtualization and build a solid foundation for leaning the deep content that will be covered throughout the day!

9:40AM Microsoft {Hyper-V}

John Kelbley- Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft

Room A

In this session, John will “dive deep” into Microsoft Hyper-V including architecture, capabilities, best practices, management.  Hyper-v was released by Microsoft almost a year ago, and has see strong adoption as a server virtualization platform based on availability (included in many editions of Windows Server 2008), price (free version available for download in Hyper-V Server), and the familiarity Windows-based management tools.   Demonstrations will include a walk-through of the Hyper-V management console, PowerShell command line examples, and high availability.

9:40AM VMware Virtualization: Where We Are, Where We Are Going, Why Others are Always Following

Dan Sullivan – New England Territory Manager, VMware

Room B

In this session, VMware’s own Dan Sullivan will outline VMware’s broad portfolio of products and update us on the roadmap for the future and VMware’s vision.

9:40AM Improving File System Performance in a Virtual Environment

Bob Nolan – President and CEO, Raxco

Room C

The appeal of virtualization -- it can save energy, footprint, manpower and money.  These savings can be realized when virtual systems are properly maintained to deliver optimum results. The Windows NT file system (NTFS) manages the allocation and use of disk space and in the process it fragments files and free space with a negative impact on performance. The same file system is running in each virtual Windows guest.   Since the hard drive is the slowest component in the computing environment anything that can speed up disk I/O in a real or virtual setting is an important element of performance and productivity. Bob Nolan’s presentation looks at the impact of disk cluster sizes and fragmentation in a virtual environment and the performance penalties of not proactively addressing the issue.  A return on investment (ROI) case study is illustrated. Stop by Room C @ 9:40 for this informative presentation.

10:50AM Security Aspects of Virtualization

Neil Smithline -

Room A

Neil Smithline will delve into the Security aspects of Virtualization. If we told you the details in advance, well me might have to…

10:50AM Application Virtualization Concepts and Platforms

Tim Mangan – Kahuna, TMurgent Technologies

Room B

In this session, Tim Mangan will lead you through a multi-vendor technical dive into the components that enable Application Virtualization Features. We will take a technical look at application virtualization capabilities of several vendors, including Microsoft (App-V, formerly SoftGrid), Citrix (RADE, formerly AIE), VMware (ThinApp, formerly ThinStall), and others. After attending this session, you will have a deep understanding of how these solutions work, and the key differences between them.

10:50AM Open Discussion Room

You

Room C

We are scheduling an open discussion room. Here, there will be no leaders, just you and whoever else shows up to talk about whatever virtualization topics you would like.

11:50PM Working Lunch

Rooms A, B, C

See Home page of the event site for up-to-date information on Lunchtime presentations.

12:40PM Physical to Virtual Migration (P2V)

John Kelbley- Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft

Room A

Configuring applications on top of a freshly installed, contemporary operating system provides the best performance and stability, but may not always be feasible.  Decoupling a vintage system from failure prone physical hardware can make sense, regardless of the support status of the system.  John Kelbley from Microsoft will review the drivers, pitfalls, promise and options for physical to virtual migration (P2V).  The goal of this session is to introduce the steps and processes that can be required to migrate an existing system into a Hyper-V (or other) virtual machine.  The session includes a walkthrough of the manual process to move a physical system into a virtual machine.

12:40PM Virtualization Performance Discussion

Dan Stolts – IT Pro Evangelist & Tony Piltzecker

Room B

This session will be a discussion, more in the form of a “Birds of a Feather”. Dan and Tony will lead off with a few slides to get things moving, but then open up a discussion that will take a look at the performance aspects of server and desktop virtualization.

12:40PM SAN Considerations for a Virtualized Data Center

Tim Gwinn- Solutions Architect, HP

Room C

Tim Gwinn – Solutions Architect from Hewlett Packard will explain what you need to consider for your storage system when deploying virtualization.  He will discuss cost savings, being ‘Green’, High Availability (with Site Recovery Manager and other DR options), and how to assess and deploy SANs based on performance.  Tim is going to share a couple of tools and tricks to use when looking at remote replication, WAN links, SAN Sizing.  If time allows there will also be a demonstration of SANiQ’s Storage Clustering; THE reason HP acquired Lefthand Networks SANs.

1:50PM Running Linux on Hyper-V: The “How To” and Support Considerations

John Kelbley- Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft

Room A

Microsoft Senior Product Manager John Kelbley will dive into running Linux on The Microsoft Hyper-V Platform.  Why would you even want to virtualize Linux on Microsoft's Hyper-V?  It may  sound strange, but are fantastic benefits including reduced management costs and improved backup and recovery.  What are the support implications of running Linux on Hyper-V?  How can you get the best performance?

1:50PM Virtual Machine Management (SCVMM)

Dan Stolts- IT Pro Evangelist, Microsoft

Room B

In this session, Dan Stolts from Microsoft will focus on System Center Virtual Machine Manager – a platform for managing virtual machines running on multiple vendor infrastructures.

1:50PM Client-Hosted Virtualization with MED-V: First Look

Matt McDermott- SqlSoft

Room C

In this session we will explore the upcoming desktop virtualization solution, MED-V, recently released to Beta.  The overview will discuss what MED-V is and how fits into with the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack.  After gaining an understanding of what MED-V is, attendees will be given a technical demonstration of the architecture, capabilities, and administrative tasks associated with implementing a MED-V solution.  In conclusion, a discussion of where MED-V is currently and where it is heading in the future will wrap up the presentation.

3:00PM Hyper-V Backup & Recovery “On The Cheap”

John Kelbley- Senior Technical Product Manager, Microsoft

Room A

Consolidation through virtualization can help  you realize savings, but have you achieved all that you can?  How do you backup and recovery your virtual machines?  Do you use the same old costly "agented" approach in your VMs you've had for your physical servers? John Kelbley from Microsoft will dive into interesting, inexpensive, and better ways to achieve backup and recovery of virtual machines hosted via Hyper-V.  Learn how to use the tools integrated with Windows Server 2008 that you may already own to improve backup and recovery of VMs.

3:00PM Virtualization on the Desktop

Jerry Feldman- Boston Linux & Unix User Group / Algorithmics

Room B

Virtualization on today’s desktop and laptop computers can be a very useful tool, but in a much different context than server virtualization. Users may have a need to run Linux on a Windows PC or run Windows on a Linux or Macintosh system. A user may have a legacy application that does not run on Windows Vista, Linux, or even Windows XP.  Today’s solution would be to run one of the several virtualization managers that are available either as Free and Open Source software or as commercial packages. Most PCs today have sufficient memory and CPU cores where 2 or more operating systems can run at the same time. Many of these products not only run on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Macintosh, and Linux, but they can host virtually everything from MS-DOS, Windows 3.1 up through Windows Vista and the latest Linux and FreeBSD products.

As a Programmer/Software Engineer, Jerry Feldman uses desktop virtualization as a tool to run software applications on different operating systems, especially Windows and Linux variations. Jerry will focus on what resources you have to run virtualization on your desktop and laptop systems, and demonstrate examples of running Windows on a Linux desktop and vice-versa.

3:00PM Case Study: Using Sanbolic on Hyper-V to Simplify SAN Storage

David Dupuis- Enterprise Solutions Support Manager, Sanbolic

Room C

Sanbolic, Inc is a Watertown, Massachusetts-based company that provides software for simplifying and sharing SAN storage. Sanbolic software allows concurrent block level read/write access  to a volume from multiple hosts, using industry-standard (iSCSI or FC) storage.  The servers can be physical or virtual. Sanbolic supports shared host access to a LUN for Windows Server 2003/2008/2008 R2 operating systems and Microsoft's Hyper-V allowing multiple VMs to be stored on a single LUN. In addition the clustered file system called Melio FS provides shared access to data on SAN storage to virtual machines.

Melio FS, provides virtually unlimited cluster sizes while providing native performance of the SAN storage infrastructure, integrated storage I/O and transaction performance monitoring, as well as quality of service assignment by host. These tools enable administrators to better identify and manage any storage bottlenecks in virtual infrastructures. The session will cover the software and technical advantages of this technology.

In this session, David Dupris will discuss a great Microsoft Case Study on a customer called MLS, using Hyper-V and our Sanbolic Melio FS to grow their business through Virtualization.

4:00PM Virtualization Q&A, Wrap-up, Evaluations, and Prizes

All

Rooms A,B,C

While you are filling out your evaluations, we will have a Virtualization Q&A session.  All the speakers will be on hand so that you can ask the questions that were not answered in today's sessions.

After all the evaluations are in, we will have drawings for the door prizes.

If you can stay a few minutes to help us clean up afterwards, it would be appreciated!