Virtualization has quickly become a staple new concept for enterprise IT. At SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo, held at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, June 23-24, we had exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases not only of how virtualization maximizes the use of resources and thus saves companies money, but also of how it is fundamentally altering the way that businesses run IT. The two content-packed days emphasized value with a rich array of sessions about the business and technical value of virtualization.

What do the following companies all have in common: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, EMC, VMware, IBM, Sun, Dell, Akamai, SalesForce.com, NetSuite, and Activision. Answer: Cloud Computing. Merrill Lynch analysts reckon that by 2011 the volume of cloud computing market opportunity will amount to $160BN, including $95BN in business and productivity apps (e-mail, office, CRM, etc.) and $65BN in online advertising.

Woe has come to a chip company and for a change it isn't AMD. In fact it may be AMD-inflicted. Late Wednesday GPU leader Nvidia, which competes with Intel and AMD's ATI graphics side, said its current quarter had come a cropper and that everybody should cut their expectations from $1.1 billion in revenue to somewhere between $875 million to $950 million, something like a 17% sequential drop. It had predicted a seasonal 5% decline a couple of months ago.

Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov sent around his response to Microsoft's surprise release of Hyper-V last week: 'While he figures it'll lower the barriers to server virtualization adoption - and tear a piece out of VMware's hide - 'the breath of 20 deployments will still be fairly narrow the feature set of Hyper-V is limited...with no support for Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, FreeBSD.'

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, Egenera CTO Pete Manca, Allen Stewart, Group Manager, Windows Virtualization at Microsoft, and Brian Duckering, Sr. Director of Products and Alliances at Symantec were the top industry executives who joined Jeremy Geelan in the 4th Floor Reuters Studio overlooking Times Square for a special SYS-CON.TV 'Virtualization Power Panel' recorded on June 22, 2008, the day before the opening of SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo - which was held 23-24 June 2008 in New York City.

There's a little puddle on Wall Street where VMware, the virtualization leader and the most brilliant IPO since Google went public, used to be. EMC, VMware's parent company, announced mid-morning that VMware co-founder Diane Greene was out presumably because the company isn't going to make its full-year 2008 guidance of 50% growth over 2007 and it hasn't reported its second quarter yet. EMC said it would come in at 'modestly below' its goal.

VMware's Board of Directors announced that it has made a change in the leadership of the company with the departure of Diane Greene as President and CEO. VMware's Board of Directors has appointed Paul Maritz as President and CEO of VMware effective immediately. Maritz was also named to VMware's Board of Directors.

The President of EMC's Cloud Computing Division, Paul Maritz, has been made President & CEO of VMware, immediately replacing co-founder and virtualization pioneer Diane Greene. Here Virtualization Journal brings a round up of the early reactions from the virtualization blogosphere.

StoneFly unveiled StoneFusion 6.1, a new more robust release of the company's intelligent network storage platform, which is integrated into all StoneFly IP SANs to provide block-level provisioning and centralized storage management, control and monitoring of logical storage volumes.

BLADE Network Technologies announced that it has joined The Green Grid consortium. As a member of the consortium, BLADE will promote the energy efficiency of today's data centers through best practices for implementing 'green' networking infrastructures. As a pioneer of energy-efficient data center networking, BLADE is recognized on AlwaysOn's GoingGreen 100 list of the world's foremost 'green' companies.

HCL Technologies announced it has signed a Global System Integration contract with VMware. This relationship combines VMware virtualization products and services with HCL's proven experience and globally benchmarked capabilities in enterprise IT infrastructure operations and transformation, thereby providing best-of-breed virtualization lifecycle services to global enterprises.

Chelsio Communications announced that its single- and dual-port 10GbE adapters are now certified for the VMware ESX hypervisor and have been added to the VMware ESX 3.5 Hardware Compatibility List. With this certification, Chelsio offers VMware customers low-latency adapters for high-performance computing in virtualized environments. This is another important step toward Chelsio's goal to enable unified wire networking for the agile data center by providing simple, standards-based solutions.

According to recent research from IDC, the pace of adoption of virtualized servers is incredibly rapid among organizations that are using virtualization, with 35% of servers purchased in 2007 being virtualized and 52% of those bought in 2008 expected to be so. 54% of those not using virtualization expect to do so in the next 18 months. While both large companies and smaller organizations are seeing virtualization as being key to their datacenter strategy, their next challenge will be to make more effective use of this capability.

Layered Technologies announced their second major product release this June. Working in direct conjunction with Microsoft, Layered Technologies launched Hyper-V. Hyper-V, previously codenamed Viridian, is a hypervisor-based technology that is a key feature of Windows Server 2008, and allows virtualization of multiple operating systems (including Windows and Linux) all on the same server. It provides a scalable, reliable, and highly available virtualization platform.

VDIworks announced it has integrated its solution with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007, which provides management of physical and virtual deployments throughout the data center, desktops and devices. With a new VDIworks plug-in, called VDIvision for System Center, joint Microsoft/VDIworks customers can use System Center to manage a variety of VDIworks-driven features, including a highly configurable and scalable connection broker, leveraging the power of desktop virtualization to reduce costs and improve security, among other benefits. On the heels of Microsoft's release of Hyper-V, VDIworks is a virtual desktop management vendor to integrate with Hyper-V and the System Center management offerings.

Akorri announced that Vancouver Coastal Health has implemented its flagship BalancePoint management solution to ensure success of the company's data center virtualization and consolidation efforts. Using BalancePoint, Vancouver Coastal Health was able to continually increase the density of its data center while improving storage utilization and maintaining optimal service levels.

Configuresoft announced its expanded partner program designed to maximize customer satisfaction and provide a more seamless relationship between Configuresoft and its partners. Enterprises are challenged with reducing costs, meeting compliance demands and managing additional complexity introduced by technologies such as virtualization and SOA, Configuresoft partners are experiencing increased demand for best-of-breed solutions such as Configuresoft's Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM).

NeoAccel announced the VMware version of its flagship product, SSL VPN-Plus. SSL VPN-Plus Gateway is the only 3rd Generation VPN able to replace IPSec and to supersede conventional SSL VPNs which suffer from the TCP-over-TCP meltdown and degraded client-server application performance. Potential VPN buyers can download and evaluate a fully functional version of SSL VPN-Plus from the company's website at www.neoaccel.com.

Univa UD announced the publication of a white paper and supporting tools that documents the process of implementing its open source UniCluster product in Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) web service. Univa UD sponsored BioTeam, a life sciences informatics consultancy and systems integrator, to document the process and publish the tools. The paper titled How to: UniCluster and Amazon EC2, presents step by step instructions for setting up UniCluster within EC2.

INX announced that it has been selected to design and deploy a Cisco unified communications solution for Springboard Non-Profit Consumer Credit Management's national call center. As the consumer credit crisis deepens, Springboard has seen large increases in demand and call volume as more people seek assistance. To scale their national counseling call center, Springboard required a communications solution to meet their demand growth. INX's expertise and strong reputation as a professional services company were key in Springboard's decision to choose INX to design, supply and implement a solution that will enable Springboard to add new employees, the majority of which are additional financial counselors.

VMware announced that Campbell Clinic Orthopaedics (Campbell Clinic) has deployed VMware Infrastructure 3 to virtualize its mission-critical applications and create a flexible, easily administered virtual infrastructure. VMware offers enterprise-class functionality in deployment sizes that fit the needs of small and midsize businesses (SMBs). The Campbell Clinic is one of thousands of SMBs that utilize VMware's proven and reliable cost-effective solutions to optimize their existing IT investments. VMware provides the scalability and flexibility for customers to buy what they need today and evolve their virtualization solutions as their business needs grow.

VMware released their new application virtualization solution called ThinApp that was acquired from Thinstall earlier this year. ThinApp is a bit different than most of the other app virtualization solutions on the market as at the end of the day IT is left with a standalone application package (.exe file) that can be deployed to any Windows device (32 or 64bit) through your existing application deployment mechanisms.

Beijing PowerUnique Technologies announced it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program. The VMware TAP program helps technology vendors integrate their products with VMware virtualization software and deliver solutions to mutual customers.

VMware announced it has completed the acquisition of B-hive Networks. VMware announced a definitive agreement to acquire B-hive on May 28, 2008. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. With this acquisition, VMware will leverage the B-hive team and technology to enhance the VMware portfolio of application and infrastructure management products by offering proactive performance management and service level reporting for applications running within virtual machines.

Parallels announced it is collaborating with HP to offer Parallels Virtuozzo Containers to HP Integrity server customers who want to virtualize business-critical Windows and Linux workloads. Parallels Virtuozzo Containers has been validated to run on HP Integrity servers, including the largest 64-processor HP Integrity Superdome servers, addressing the needs of customers who require Windows and Linux-based Itanium virtualization.

Parallels announced that its Parallels Automation solution now integrates with Secure64 DNS, giving service providers who use Parallels Automation the ability to easily manage Secure64 servers within their datacenters. Through the collaboration, Parallels Automation is able to offer a new option for service providers searching for secure and highly available DNS solution.

MaximumASP announced the release of Hyper-V technology as part of their dedicated server line-up. MaximumASP was among a handful of hosting providers selected for the Hyper-V Go Live program and first to launch hosted betas for IIS 7/Windows Server 2008 dedicated servers.

Mellanox Technologies and Galactic Computing announced that Mellanox's 20Gb/s InfiniBand adapters provide the low-latency, high-performance storage interconnect for Galactic Computing's line of VSTOR storage systems and gateways, providing an adaptive and responsive infrastructure for business continuity and disaster recovery applications such as remote mirroring and replication. VSTOR supports Fibre Channel, iSCSI, InfiniBand, SAS and NAS connections to servers allowing total flexibility in access. Mellanox InfiniBand adapters serve as the ideal choice for workloads that require high performance, efficiency and scalability.

VKernel announced the appointment of Gene Fay as vice president of sales. In this role, Fay is responsible for VKernel's worldwide sales and will be instrumental in expanding the company's go-to-market strategy and building successful channel partner programs.

Virtualization is fast emerging as a game-changing technology in the enterprise computing space. What was once viewed as a technology useful for testing and development is going mainstream and is affecting the entire data-center ecosystem.

'Virtualization use has exploded since our last survey of the European market,' said Chris Ingle, consulting and research director of IDC's Systems Group, as IDC this week released its 2008 European Server Virtualization Survey. The study was first carried out in 2007 and has been repeated in 1Q08 with a larger sample of organizations and a wider range of questions.

We recently returned from the SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo, held at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, June 23-24. The conference hosted a slate of exceptional speakers - representing both the larger industry players such as Red Hat (Brian Stevens), Citrix (Simon Crosby), VMware (Stephen Herrod) and also a very engaging group of virtualization startups executives. The conference...delivered a very knowledgable, engaged and high powered audience. Speakers made a series of high-quality presentations not only of the basic value propositions for adopting virtualization (consolidation, optimization of resources, flexibility etc), but also painted a compelling vision of the future.

Marathon Technologies announced today that it has been selected by Everything Channel as a CRN Emerging Tech vendor for developing everRun VM, the world's first fault-tolerant, high availability software for server virtualization. CRN's Emerging Tech list highlights companies that are delivering high margins for solution providers with innovative and easy-to-use technology that undercuts industry giants. Launched in April 2008, Marathon's everRun VM addresses one of the major factors holding back broader adoption of server virtualization -- a lack of automated and reliable high availability software to reliably protect essential applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL and SharePoint in physical and virtual environments.

Genius Inside announced the creation and launch of Genius Project, a comprehensive, easy-to-use, on-demand, collaborative PPM solution that helps companies get things done better, faster, and cheaper than ever before, across any and all geographic boundaries.

PlateSpin has trotted out its first major product release since Novell bought the virtualization management operation back in March with the launch of PowerConvert 7.0, its data center disaster recovery mojo. The software has new backup and recovery features and expanded multi-platform support.

XenSource signed an important partnership with Symantec about 9 months ago, that would allow us to integrate Symantec Storage Foundation as an included volume manager in XenSource's XenEnterprise product. The deal was based on the realities of the XenSource situation at the time - namely we were an independent company with our own routes to market. The Symantec Storage Foundation would be included for customers at no additional charge, when they purchased XenEnterprise. Also included in XenEnterprise is a standard Linux based volume manager, LVM, as well as storage repositories for VHD based virtual hard disks on NFS, and iSCSI 'LUN per VDI' storage.

Open Source. Open Standards. Open Collaboration. At the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo, Red Hat's CTO Brian Stevens spoke about how, over the past five years, the open source community has turned its attention to virtualization and what has been achieved and what is under development, and most important why open source is critical when building integrated infrastructure solutions.

Microsoft managed to get its VMware-spooking Hyper-V, its hypervisor-based virtualization technology, out the door Thursday, which is something of an accomplishment considering that by Microsoft's clock the thing is weeks early, having not been expected until August sometime.

Mike Neil is general manager for virtualization strategy in the Windows Server Division at Microsoft. Mike is focused on the delivery of the Windows virtualization technology, including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server and Virtual PC 2007. Mike also directs the technical enablement of Microsoft's broader vision for virtualization, to include virtualization management tools and virtualized desktop infrastructure. Prior to this role, Mike was responsible for Microsoft's server and PC virtualization efforts since 2003.

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