Today, Virtualization is in the forefront - helping businesses with scalability, security and management of their global IT infrastructure. The second Virtualization Conference & Expo endeavors to provide IT professionals with the knowledge and skills required to derive maximum benefits from this efficient approach to computing.

Just three years after it was founded, XenSource has gotten itself acquired for half a billion dollars by Citrix Systems Inc., demonstrating the rising value and power of virtualization.

Companies are finding it increasingly difficult to manage their enterprise data centers as they become highly complex, expensive to build out, and difficult to reconfigure as needs change. In an effort to address these challenges, many IT professionals are turning to virtualization technologies.

When you think about virtualization, you probably think about VMware, or maybe Xen, and hopefully, even OpenVZ. With all the buzz surrounding this space, I thought it time to discuss three of the four different types of virtualization: emulation, paravirtualization, operating system-level virtualization, and multi-server (cluster) virtualization. The last is outside the scope of this article.

IBM and Intel are holding hands now over an initiative to push virtualization on multiprocessors, saying larger, more expandable MP servers deliver the best return on investment. To prove their point, they've come up with a new virtualization benchmarking methodology called vConsolidate.

The researchers at TheInfoPro (TIP) figure only 10% of the server production environment in Fortune 1000s and mid-sizes firms was virtualized at the end of last year and that, based on answers to their questions, 25% of production applications will be by 2009 - in some case more than 50%.

There's a new style of virtualization that made it into Linux a whole lot faster than Xen, which has been scratching at that door to no avail. The stuff is called KVM for Kernel-based Virtual Machine and it's supported by the latest cut of Linux, 2.6.20 and, like Xen, it's open source.

These new offerings, known as the 'System p Configurations for SOA Entry Points,' use virtualization technology in an SOA, to ensure more balanced, flexible use of resources throughout a company. IBM has identified five SOA entry points -- people, processes, information, connectivity and reuse -- based on its success helping customers achieve business results through SOA.

SWsoft said from CeBit that it was going to bundle its open source-based Virtuozzo server virtualization software with a standard distribution of SUSE 10 and deliver it through SWsoft channels. It's supposed to be available next quarter and run on both x86 and Itanium machines. SWsoft will support it, backed up by Novell for all the unmodified components. Novell is interested in expanding its customer base, according to the head of SUSE product management Holger Dyroff.

Existing storage management methods and tools can't keep pace with exploding storage requirements. Application expansion, digital media formats, and regulatory compliance have all contributed to the fast-growing demand. According to IDC, storage administrator productivity has to increase 60% a year just to keep up with the anticipated growth in storage capacity.

The demand for storage will continue to grow. Endless amounts of data are being created driving greater storage capacity requirements and price improvements. That same data must be classified and moved into various tiers of storage to facilitate cost-effective implementations.

Most of today's hype revolves around hardware virtualization, also know as hypervisors or virtual machines. This session will focus on the alternative technology know as containers, or operating system virtualization.

Companies are finding it increasingly difficult to manage their enterprise data centers. They're highly complex, expensive to build out and difficult to reconfigure. The net result is a high cost of ownership for a resource that is poorly positioned to meet the needs of businesses.

Mellanox Technologies is a leading supplier of semiconductor-based, high-performance, InfiniBand interconnect products that facilitate data transmission between servers, communications infrastructure equipment, and storage systems.

With mounting pressure to decrease data center costs while staying on top of IT infrastructure, enterprises are pitted with the challenge to optimize their data centers. To meet this challenge, many are embracing virtualization. While this provides answers to IT managers' challenges, mapping out a methodical approach with complete analysis and evaluation of all opportunities is critical.