On Tuesday 28th I delivered the 1st of my EMEA Virtual Server events, which will be touring to >25 countries across the EMEA region over the next 6 months. Sharing the presenting was Shai Ofek (Microsoft Corp, from Remdond) and David Miller (Avanade). I've posted the session titles and abstracts below, and linked to the PPT decks.

Microsoft Virtualisation: Today and Tomorrow

Virtual PC and Virtual Server have gained significant adoption in development and test environments, and are an important stepping stone to realising Microsofts vision of self-managing dynamic systems. Virtualisation technology is gaining a foothold in the data centre, enabling more efficient utilisation of hardware and helping IT react more quickly to changing demands. This session introduces the Microsoft Virtual Server technology, its capabilities, how its being deployed today and the benefits and challenges customers are seeing. We look at how Microsoft will evolve the technology with the introduction of Hypervisor in codename Longhorn Server. We’ll look at the steps Microsoft is taking to help customers and partners use Virtual Server effectively in heterogeneous environments.  Finally, we’ll predict how virtualisation will change IT, from the data centre to the branch, servers to the desktop.

Managing a Mixed Virtual/Physical Environment: Tools and Techniques

Microsoft believes the management of physical and virtual machines should be largely transparent. The same tools and techniques should be used to deploy, monitor, maintain, and backup physical and virtual machines. For this to happen, tools need to understand the difference between physical and virtual, and automatically adjust the actions they undertake to accomplish the same task for physical and virtual. This session looks at System Centre Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), Microsofts first product which bridges the gap between physical and virtual. We’ll look at the complete lifecycle, from provisioning, to backup, migration (physical to virtual and back) to monitoring, and how this fits into the management of the rest of the server infrastructure.  

Microsoft Virtualisation Deep Dive

What is the Architecture of Virtual Server, and how will this change with the introduction of Hypervisor? How does host clustering work, what are enlightenments? This session starts with a look at the components which make up Virtual Server, covers the changes introduced with Windows Virtualisation (Hypervisor), and takes a detailed look how the virtualisation stack works.  We cover the High Availability capabilities inherent in Virtual Server, investigate the benefits of AMD-V and Intel VT hardware virtualisation for non-Windows guests and cover some of the standards work Microsoft is pushing to improve the performance of disk and network for the virtualisation industry.

Avanade: Virtual Server notes from the field

If you believe the hype, you could be forgiven for thinking Virtualisation can solve most IT problems. In this session, Avanade will share the experience they have gained helping customers adopt, deploy and manage Virtual Server. We’ll look at typical workloads, why they’ve been virtualised, the challenges they needed to overcome to gain business benefits. And, of course what the business benefits were. Things like backup and recovery, load balancing and capacity management are all covered. In effect, the good, the bad and the ugly.

As usual, I welcome feedback.