The Series Includes:

5 Sessions of Expert Advanced Virtualization Content

IT managers who've moved past the pilot stage and into production with server virtualization are realizing that there's more to virtualization than just cramming lots of virtual machines onto servers to save floor space and power. Production virtual environments present issues not seen in the old world - in areas like managing change, ensuring data protection and tuning performance, for example. But the technology also presents opportunities to improve availability, manageability and performance in ways unique to virtual environments. This seminar will help set IT pros on the road to leveraging the best of virtualization without being ambushed by its unique challenges.

Session 1: Re-architecting your Virtual Environment

Now that you're running virtualization in production, this session will take you through the processes for analyzing an existing virtual infrastructure and selecting hardware, platforms and virtual infrastructure technologies to make your virtual environment run at its full potential. Many enterprises are faced with pending hardware refresh cycles, while others are virtualizing additional servers for the first time. This session provides practical guidance on state of the art virtualization architectures, with attention directed toward the following topics:

• Virtual infrastructure analysis and data collection methodologies
• Effective strategies for running mission critical and homegrown applications in virtual environments
• Server platform selection, with key differentiators amongst competing rack mount and blade platforms
• Details on the technical drivers for second generation hardware assisted virtualization
• Key decision points on managing heterogeneous virtual environments

Session 2: Virtual Infrastructure Automation and High Availability Best Practices

Numerous improvements in virtual infrastructure high availability have caused countless enterprises to rethink their existing virtualization HA architectures. Is your virtual HA architecture "so last year," or is it following state of the art IT best practices? In this session, HA best practices for all major virtualization platforms are highlighted, along with available tools that allow organizations to take their virtual infrastructures beyond simple failover to application level orchestration and automation. Topics include:

• High Availability improvements
• Storage Area Network considerations
• iSCSI Integration
• Failover policies

Session 3: Virtual Infrastructure Tuning and Advanced Management

Advanced virtualization infrastructures can perform badly if improperly configured and managed. This session explores tuning and management concepts of the virtual infrastructure, including:

• Leveraging new technologies such as OVF to streamline virtual machine management
• Virtual network security best practices
• Troubleshooting performance bottlenecks, including application, CPU, network and storage
• Performance optimization
• Scripted management solutions, including VM auditing, monitoring and Active Directory integration

Session 4: Protecting your Virtual Environment: Backup and Storage

Data growth seems only to accelerate. Protecting the whole system from application data to virtual machines, applications and their configurations has not only changed from the traditional backup/restore methods but had fanned out into a number of methods. This session digs through the various methods and technologies including:

• VMware Consolidated Backup
• N-Port ID Virtualization
• Looking out for the Application
• Protection scalability and performance
• Best practices and pitfalls to avoid

Session 5: Advanced Business Continuity Blueprints for Virtual Environments

Business continuity continues to prove its importance to IT organizations of all sizes, but advanced virtualization management tools are now bringing business continuity and disaster recovery solutions within reach of mid-market organizations and are suggesting cost reductions to enterprises. This session explores various methods and technologies including:

• Virtualization tools for business continuity
• Dealing with replication issues
• Virtual environment disaster recovery
• Designs to avoid