The jury is in. All indicators show that the ubiquitous nature of virtualization in the enterprise is a sure bet. The virtualization software market is projected to grow from $810M in 2006 to $1.8B in 2009, and server virtualization adoption is expected to reach 65 percent in 2009. The key drivers for this aggressive adoption of virtualization among enterprises are well understood.

Select Technologies, a division of WeP Solutions, has entered into a distribution tie up with VMWare - to extend virtualization strategy and outline product road map. VMware's expertise lies in offering virtualization platform IT Infrastructure, enabling higher level of protection for business critical systems and data for small and medium business enterprises. According to WeP, this will be mutually beneficial as Select Technologies also focuses on the SMB segment primarily.

Zend Technologies and Parallels announced that they will collaborate on solutions that enable hosting providers to deliver PHP applications through Parallels' control panels and server virtualization offerings. The companies will deliver product interoperability and integration, define packaging and distribution standards, and pursue joint marketing initiatives.

As data growth rates continue to climb and business requirements further evolve, customers are feeling the pressure to realign their storage infrastructure to better meet the needs of their business. Mr. Yoshida will discuss how storage virtualization is the key enabler towards the storage-based services required to deliver substantial breakthroughs in efficiency and business agility across the entire enterprise. He will discuss how storage-based services such as thin provisioning, content and file management and dynamic data migration, enabled via controller-based Virtualization, are paving the way for the Dynamic Data Center of tomorrow.

Does virtualization matter? Can virtual desktops go beyond the sum of the virtual parts? What is the business value and at what price? As server virtualization continues to gain deeper traction and provide benefits beyond server consolidation, desktop virtualization is widely expected to follow a similar trajectory and address many of the challenges associated with enterprise desktops. Virtual desktops hold the promise of increased business agility at reduced complexity and cost, while providing high fidelity user experience at a lower carbon footprint. How is this promise delivered? This session explores the current technology trends, business scenarios and economic imperatives that are shaping the future of virtual desktops, enabling new delivery and consumption models.

Citrix is supposed to trot out XenDesktop - its virtual Windows desktop trick - any minute now and when it does the UK firm AppSense is supposed to be there to make the Xen widgetry useful. See, the way it works every time you restart XenDesktop you start with a clean slate, according to AppSense VP of corporate and product strategy Martin Ingram. You'll lose your personalized settings and corporate policies but for the intervention of AppSense Environment Manager, used before with other Citrix products and extended to support the XenDesktop Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

LeftHand Networks announced that its iSCSI SANs are now Citrix Ready vendor verified with Citrix XenServer 4.1. LeftHand Networks iSCSI SANs complement Citrix XenServer 4.1, providing customers with highly available server and storage solutions for their data center environments. Powered by SAN/iQ storage software, LeftHand Networks' iSCSI SAN solutions deliver a rich, fully-integrated feature set, advanced data protection, centralized management and a best-in-class solution for optimizing performance and manageability in virtual server environments.

rPath announced that virtual appliances intended for the Citrix Ready designation can be developed using rBuilder and the rPath Appliance Platform. A virtual appliance is an application combined with a streamlined operating system, offered in a format that runs in virtualized environments. Using rBuilder, a developer can create a virtual appliance for Citrix XenServer and submit it to Citrix for verification. The Citrix Ready designation is awarded to third party products that have successfully met the verification criteria set by Citrix. The verification process includes an extensive series of tests to ensure consistency and completeness of the virtual appliance before it is certified.

F5 Networks announced that Shopzilla has deployed F5 Acopia ARX intelligent file virtualization systems as the foundation of its file storage management strategy. Shopzilla is leveraging the F5 Acopia ARX system's unrivaled data migration, global namespace, and data replication capabilities in order to maintain fast response times and uninterrupted access for its more than 20 million visitors each month.

Data center architects naturally seek to employ server virtualization to maximize the use of their hardware systems. An often overlooked factor that can undermine this goal is data connectivity. 75 to 95 percent of the response time now associated with database access can often be attributed to the data connectivity layer - and that's using traditional, non-virtualized servers. Running multiple virtual servers on a single machine can introduce additional complications involving data access. This presentation will examine the importance of data connectivity in a virtualized environment, and the need to take an intelligent approach to data access in order to truly reap the benefit of a virtualization strategy.

Depending on your perspective, SOA and virtualization are either synergistic or threaten increased complexity. This session will explain how implementing the right network architecture can make the most of both, promoting agility and reducing complexity. 'Service virtualization' takes functionality that is common across applications and generalizes and leverages it across the business. Capabilities like multicast, encryption, load balancing and data caching - traditionally applications on dedicated servers - have migrated into the network, where they can be virtualized and shared by multiple applications delivered to end users across multiple devices. Attendees will learn how the right network architecture can support strategies like Web 2.0 and SOA, and how the network can reduce complexity and management costs, enhance system resiliency and flexibility, and improve usage and efficiency of networked assets and applications.

This week you'll be able to order that disaster recovery pack that VMware has been promising since last September, Site Recovery Manager, but it'll take them another month to deliver it. It's supposed to let you set up, test and automate disaster recovery in a way that's not available with traditional methods, it says, painting a ghastly picture of how exposed companies are because it's otherwise so hard and downtime prolonged.

BMC Software announced that customer adoption of its Business Service Management platform continues to escalate, in part because it provides customers with virtualization management solutions designed to simultaneously manage mission-critical applications across both virtual and physical IT environments. Currently, only BMC delivers fully-integrated, native virtualization management solutions that unify the control and management of both environments into a single view. This ability allows customers to manage risk and ROI across the full lifecycle of virtual data centers, including both distributed and mainframe environments. Other vendor offerings have been limited to managing virtual machines, often without reference to ramifications that virtualization has on the processes and management of the larger infrastructure.

MokaFive announced the availability of the MokaFive Virtual Desktop Solution. Now, organizations have a cross-platform desktop virtualization offering that delivers the best of both worlds: the control of centralized management for IT administrators and the power and flexibility of rich, local execution for users.

Fortisphere announced that its Virtual Essentials product suite has been verified as Citrix Ready for Citrix XenServer. Fortisphere is a policy-based virtualization management provider to offer full XenServer support for organizations that want to more intelligently manage and grow their virtual infrastructure with Citrix virtualization technology.

While the next-generation data center has begun to take shape, the promise of true dynamic computing has so far eluded today's resource, bandwidth and power constrained enterprises. Now however, key advancements in network and processor technologies are converging to lift the remaining barriers and enable truly dynamic computing. In this presentation, IT professionals will learn why this convergence enables the Coherent Network, turning an Enterprise Data Center into a single dynamic resource pool of compute cores, memory, and I/O.

The last 10 years has seen a remarkable evolution in virtualization. First generation virtualization centered on Development & Testing and was largely confined to desktop computers and test servers. Second generation technology focused on Server Consolidation to lower hardware costs and saw the rise of hypervisor-powered hardware virtualization solutions. Now, we?re entering the third generation of virtualization, where Optimizing IT Infrastructure in the datacenter is critical. This next step forward will involve large-scale virtualized datacenter deployments that are heterogeneous, cross-platform, and include operating system and hypervisor-based virtualization for servers and workstations.

Check Point announced the availability of ZoneAlarm ForceField, a comprehensive, virtualized browser security solution enabling consumers to bank and shop online, or surf the Internet without fear or limitation. Virtualized browsing places a two-way 'bubble of security' around the browser, preventing drive-by-downloads, unwanted malware and other Web threats from damaging users' PCs or from stealing users' private information.

As virtualization platform vendors strengthen and expand the feature sets of their respective offerings, it is almost a certainty that the data center in the future will include a heterogeneous mix of virtualization platforms as well as physical platforms. For organizations that are moving to virtualization, choosing the correct platform for their needs is only the start. For certain, organizations also will need to obtain a set of virtualization utilities to assist in moving to, and managing, one or more virtual platforms in their data centers. These utilities must not simply be ?repurposed? tools from the physical world, but should also be specifically designed to leverage the efficiencies and unique characteristics of the virtual platform.

Dell is going to try to cut the energy consumption of its laptops and desktops by up to 25% between now and 2010 to avoid millions of tons of CO2 emissions, comparing its pledge to HP's, which is supposed to cut relative its 2005 levels. It says Dell OptiPlex desktop are down nearly 50% since 2005 and Latitude laptops are down 16% since 2006.

Emulex announced that its LightPulse Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) were selected as the storage area network (SAN) connectivity solution of choice in two end users' server virtualization projects that utilize EMC networked storage systems. Home Interiors & Gifts and Molex Incorporated selected Emulex HBAs based on ease of administration, reliability and customer confidence in support for future evolution of the SAN architecture.

Computer Lab International and Ericom announced a partnership in which Computer Lab International thin clients will include Ericom's PowerTerm WebConnect for Desktop Virtualization and Server Based Computing. Computer Lab International, a twenty year veteran in thin client computing, coupled with Ericom's PowerTerm WebConnect provides secure and centrally managed access to applications and desktops running on Microsoft Windows Terminal Servers, Virtual Desktops (VDI), Blade PCs and legacy host systems. The alliance offers a full featured virtualization solution that enhances an already compelling reduced cost and complexity of traditional desktop management.

Computer Lab International (CLI) announced support for Citrix XenDesktop - a desktop virtualization solution. Each of CLI's desktop appliance platforms will support XenDesktop including CLI XP Embedded, Windows CE Embedded and Linux Embedded desktop appliances. This tight integration with XenDesktop allows organizations to offer the best user experience combined with the reliability and manageability of CLI desktop appliances.

The applications for system virtualization technology in IT infrastructure are well known, including resource optimization and migration ease. But virtualization technology has broader applications in non-IT computer systems, including embedded and hand-held devices. This paper surveys the motivations for system virtualization outside of the IT server space, and presents several system architectures for both fielded and in development systems that use system virtualization in unique ways. The systems include instances that require co-deployment of multiple virtualized guests with security-critical applications, and embedded applications that benefit from a heterogeneous OS architecture.

With the rapid deployment of server virtualization technology in the data center, IT management is actively looking at optimizing their SAN storage architecture to reap the full benefits of their virtualization investment, such as workload mobility and disaster recovery, without running into I/O bottlenecks and unpredictable utilization of SAN resources that comes with a much more dynamic environment. This session will explore how Data Center Fabric enables virtual servers and physical servers to stand on an equal footing. It will also discuss capabilities specifically designed to support virtualized environments such as VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen.

Virtualization is not a new story; its technologies allow companies to meet new business needs and say goodbye to underutilized hardware platforms, power consumption, server sprawl and spiraling IT costs. The technology is here and the benefits are already proving to be fruitful. However, these benefits are only possible if effective management tools are in place. This session will discuss virtualization's missing link - data center automation - and how organizations can use it to create an agile, policy-based environment to automate and orchestrate virtual machine lifecycle management. For without proper management, companies only have a piece of the virtualization puzzle.

The initial uses of Service-Oriented Virtualization were to allow the development and testing team to regain agility much earlier in the lifecycle - so they could do their needed functional and regression testing against Virtual Services instead of constrained live applications - the essential services, databases and mainframes in the environment. But that same virtualization is perhaps even more valuable in the performance lab, if you can apply serious load testing to it.

But that same virtualization is perhaps even more valuable in the performance lab, if you can apply serious load testing to it. The constraints of having a realistic environment and test data to test and develop against is holding these teams back from finding performance issues much earlier - so we can gauge SLAs (service levels) at the component level. And in SOA - where you are dealing with services and underlying systems that are distributed and constantly changing, replicating that whole environment is incredibly costly and time consuming.

Citrix announced the expansion of its Citrix Delivery Center product family with three important new additions. Taking its inspiration from the world of digital media services where highly optimized delivery networks give subscribers in any location fast easy access to on-demand content, Citrix unveiled innovative new 'repeaters' and 'receivers' that help corporate IT organizations provide a similar level of service when delivering desktops and applications to end users around the world. These new additions further extend the value of Citrix Delivery Center, using advanced virtualization and networking technologies to help customers transform static datacenters into dynamic 'delivery centers' for the best performance, security, cost savings and business agility.

Azul Systems announced the availability of the Vega 3 Series appliances, which provides a way for companies to run, process, and manage Java applications for their business critical needs. Compared to the company's pioneering first generation Network Attached Processing product, the Vega 3 products represent a fivefold improvement in performance demonstrating Azul's commitment and execution on an aggressive product roadmap. This new solution, packaged in compact 5U or 14U appliance form factors, makes it easier for Enterprises in the E-Commerce, Financial Services, Web Hosting, and Telecommunications markets to maximize transactional volumes and minimize downtime, while decreasing overall response time. The Vega 3 Series provides companies with opportunities to run their businesses in environmentally-friendly ways by aiding datacenter virtualization initiatives and reducing power consumption costs yet still consistently improving the performance of applications.

Splunk announced the availability of its server virtualization management application, Splunk for Citrix XenServer Management which offers extended management capabilities for Citrix XenServer. In the coming months, Splunk will release applications for each of the server virtualization platforms, built on the company's IT Search platform. Splunk brings IT Search, indexing, alert and reporting to the challenges of troubleshooting server virtualization.

With a remote workforce, either through offshoring business processes or remote home workers, it is essential to keep the data safe while providing the most flexible computing experience. This session will discuss the strategies and pitfalls when building a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). It will discuss cost issues and help customers build a compelling Retrun On Investment through determining the Total Cost of Ownership of a VDI implementation. This session will also cover the strategic architecture and how to build a VDI Solution that will allow an Organization to reap the benefits of a remote workforce.

To achieve the full potential of 'cloud computing' we need a broader definition of virtualization, and that is the complete de-coupling of the logical components of an application (represented by the software stack) and the physical resources. In the case of middleware, whether it is data access, messaging or the business logic, the physical location of the resources should not matter to the developer and to the end user. This is not a trivial thing to do, especially when it comes to data-intensive, stateful (transactional or otherwise) applications and services. In this session we will explore the challenges and propose a solution, including a live demo.

Citrix announced the availability of Citrix XenDesktop. The company also revealed previously unannounced details about the complete XenDesktop product line - including the release of a new Express Edition offering free desktop virtualization for up to 10 users - and new Enterprise and Platinum Editions, which tightly integrate the industry's most proven application virtualization via the new XenApp for Virtual Desktops feature. All editions of XenDesktop are optimized to work with the new Citrix Desktop Receiver client to create an unparalleled end user experience, as well as a wide range of certified Citrix Ready hardware and software solutions, creating a comprehensive solution for desktop delivery.

Citrix and Microsoft announced the availability of Citrix Branch Repeater , an innovative new line of branch office appliances developed and marketed as part of a strategic alliance between the two companies. By staging the delivery of applications and Windows services closer to branch office users, Citrix Branch Repeater helps make branch office computing faster and more cost-effective for companies of all sizes.

Today, many organizations hear the term virtualization and still only think of the technology used in a datacenter. While this might be where virtualization started and has received a lot of attention, the next wave of virtualization is happening in connected devices through embedded technologies. When applied, virtualization allows organizations and developers working with front-end connected devices such as mobile phones, set-top boxes and WiMax base stations, to experience business benefits such as reduced bill-of-material costs, faster time-to-market and richer, more functional designs that feature reduced power, improved security and greater reliability.

There has been much speculation about the security posture of virtualized environments. One identified vulnerability is the 'hypervisor' threat in which a hacker can break out of a guest OS and onto the host OS of a server. How great a danger is the hypervisor threat? What security barriers should IT erect before and after they implement their virtual environment? Virtual security expert Hezi Moore will help attendees separate the virtualized wheat from the real chaff.

The ultimate goal of virtualization is to increase the utilization and efficiency of your current infrastructure. To that end, one should consider virtualizing the entire data center, including the traditional servers and storage, but also bringing in networking, cable management, power management, cooling/airflow capabilities, etc. This allows for extreme flexibility and agility in terms of managing the infrastructure to the point of being able to roll in and out entire racks of equipment without needing an electrician to add power outlets, without adjusting tile placement for airflow, without pulling extra cable runs, etc ... basically roll it in, plug it in, connect the network/FC cables, power up and go, all within 30-45 minutes. Additionally, efficiency and power savings are very critical in the design and architecture phases, making sure to provide as much power to the IT equipment and as little to the supporting infrastructure as possible. By utilizing a management framework based upon ITIL, and having the proper expertise with ISV applications, security, H/A and BC/DR, one can manage these new capabilities with greater ease and better cost control.

Surgient announced the appointment of Craig Parks to vice president of marketing. Parks will be responsible for building on Surgient's standing in the virtualization market and for expanding the company's market footprint. He and his growing marketing team will also drive product marketing, corporate communications and channel program strategies.

Wyse Technology announced the availability of the Wyse Viance family of devices. This new class of devices is specifically optimized for the new Citrix XenDesktop product line. With the availability of the Wyse Viance, Wyse is delivering an appliance to meet the 'plus' specifications of the Citrix Ready Desktop Appliance program that are required for maximum integration with Citrix XenDesktop. With Wyse's additional announcements regarding TCX Multimedia 3.0 and more, Wyse is taking the leadership role in offering high levels of experience for Citrix XenDesktop users.