InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum 2006 Day 1

For those of you who were unable to attend the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum 2006 event that took place on Monday and Tuesday of this week, you missed a really great time!

Venue

The Roosevelt Hotel seemed to be a fantastic venue for the first InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum. The Grand Ballroom was the perfect size to fit the event, and the table and chair layout was not only comfortable, but offered a great way to meet and interact with peers. It was quite easy to talk with and meet the people sitting at your table. The usual rows of chairs at events don’t make it easy to speak with anyone except for the two people sitting on each side of you.

And what a great mix of people in attendance, from many diverse companies and backgrounds, and different levels of virtualization knowledge and experience. It was great fun speaking with decision makers to find out their thoughts and ideas around virtualization and how they think it fits in their organization. They wanted to know how it affected their bottom line, and they listened intently to the speakers, exhibitors, and those of us walking around the floor.

The stage was setup in a way that there really wasn’t a bad seat in the room. Which is odd for me, I’m used to getting into a session late and not being able to hear or see what’s going on. The event also had a second room, the Plaza Suite for other break out sessions as well. The room was smaller than the ballroom, but comfortably fit everyone in the sessions that I was able to attend.

Security was high on my first day at the Roosevelt. After getting my luggage scanned at the airport, I thought I was all set. Who knew it would be scanned again at the hotel. This was my first trip to the big apple, and I didn’t know if this was customary or not. Come to find out, this isn’t an everyday occurrence, nor was this due to the forum. It seems that important people were in town this week… but who were in New York for something bigger than virtualization (is that possible?).

And might I add, this was the best dressed IT forum that I have been to yet. I don’t think I’ve seen this many suites and ties at an IT forum in my life! No shorts and t-shirts with geek phrases at this forum, that’s for sure!

The Keynotes

The keynotes did not disappoint. In fact, the general tone and overview of each keynote session simply reiterated what I have already come to know and talk about regularly… virtualization is catching on and the keynote speakers reiterated this notion. In the first two morning keynote sessions, the two speakers really brought it home, each talking to the subject at a high level. Steve Fox kicked off the forum in high gear, explaining the various types of virtualization, their benefits, and noting that “It’s all about the business”. One of the main questions asked at every forum was “will the slides be made available at some point for download?” So before people could ask, Steve let the audience know, the presentations will be made available on October 1st at virtexecforum.com. So watch for the slides!

Steve Yatko (CTO, Managing Director, Global Head of R&D, Credit Suisse Securities) and Dr. Jeff Jaffe (Executive Vice President, CTO, Novell) each did a fantastic job of keeping the audience’s attention with a high level business discussion around virtualization, and did so with very little overlap. The challenges and benefits of virtualization were explored. Dr. Jaffe interjected a bit of humor into his discussion as he talked about the changing world. Open-source technology was one of the key topics here, and its future was heavily discussed.

There was a lot of information and a lot to take in from each of these presentations, and whether you were in the audience or not, I would highly recommend downloading the slides when made available to go back over them. The presentations were both well received, and the ballroom was packed.

The Sessions

The general and breakout sessions were a little less formal than the key note sessions. Using a more Q&A panel discussion layout, the audience was able to hear a nice mix of expertise and use case scenarios. The topics on day 1 ran the gambit. Panel experts talked about storage virtualization, virtual server sprawl problems, the how and why virtualization was found to be needed in different environments, product complexity, scalability and metrics needed to determine if costs or productivity are being met, as well as covering applications that leverage virtualization such as through development and testing.

One of the sessions I enjoyed that dug deep into the virtualization products itself was “Inside Hardware Assisted Virtualization”. For the techie, this one was a must see. It was great to hear VMware, XenSource, Microsoft and Virtual Iron representatives all on the stage at the same time, talking about their products and where they overlap or depart. Unlike some of the other sessions, this one was most definitely not a high level discussion. This one dug deep into paravirtualization, hypervisors, drivers, and more.

If I were a virtual machine, I would have cloned myself to be able to see and hear everything. Unfortunately, I could not. The drawback to having a lot of things going on at once… you end up missing a few things.

The Exhibitors

If you wanted to find out more information about each of the contributing sponsors of this year’s forum, you didn’t have to go far. Each sponsor had their own exhibit booth that was manned by well informed employees who were all too eager to talk about their company’s product. Unlike some forum events where the exhibit booths are manned by spokes models, this time I was actually able to have an intelligent conversation with the person manning the booth and walk away with a better understanding of the company, its product, and where they fit in the realm of virtualization. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t simply leave with information in hand, for those of you wondering, yes, the exhibitors brought swag. I didn’t escape with any Hollywood swag, but the usual tech giveaways were out there: pens, USB drives, shirts, hats, a cool time piece, a plush SUSE toy (for my daughter of course) and more. Oddly enough, none of the exhibitors were making people scream out catch phrases or play games for prizes. They simply made them available. Which I suppose goes back to the whole “well dressed attendees” thing.