From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

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.

This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for me to talk in generics and leave out specific details that might be covered by the NDA. I am planning on providing a quick introduction to Objective-C for those attendees who may have never seen it and might be worried that it will be difficult to code in (it isn't!).

The Solaris Container typically can be categorized as an operating-system virtualization, which means the virtualization is done by enabling multiple isolated and secured systems in one physical server (operating system for operating system). The Solaris Resource Management and Zones are the basic functions that form the Solaris Container.

The computing industry goes in cycles. The latest trend, growing in buzz over the past year, is server consolidation aided by virtualization software. Virtualization software for a computer allows a single machine to behave as though it were many different, separate computing systems; each virtualized instance behaves almost identically to an independent physical machine. Using virtualization software, a roomful of servers can be consolidated onto a single physical box (provided it's powerful enough). Pundits claim this trend is cyclical because it's returning us to the old days of a single large, powerful computer (a la the mainframe) running all of the tasks in an organization. Although the modern consolidated, virtualized server is unlikely to look anything like the old mainframes, it's instructive to examine the virtualization trend in light of this mainframe comparison to see if there are any lessons to be learned.

A character on the TV show 'L.A. Law' once said, 'It was the 60s. Safe sex meant keeping the parking brake on.' In the early days of public networks security carried a similar sense of urgency. In fact, the network was its own best defense. One of the authors remembers accommodating a colleague by spending an afternoon plotting the hops, gateways, and contorted syntax necessary to send an e-mail from Brooklyn to Michigan. (How many computer scientists does it take to send an e-mail?)

Cassatt has announced general availability of its new Cassatt Collage Web Automation Module (WAM), software aimed at helping IT organizations with their server consolidation efforts by providing Java application virtualization and management for Java EE applications.

Server automation and virtualization software company, SWsoft, has announced official Novell YES certification on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server of its Plesk Linux control panel for service providers. According to the company, SWsoft customers and partners can now have additional confidence in Plesk's fully testing and support on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.

Typical enterprise IT environments have as much as 90% of their hardware and software resources sitting idle at any given time, in anticipation of usage spikes. The Cassatt software, called Collage, creates a dynamic, virtual pool of resources that business applications can draw from, using existing software, servers, and networks. Cassatt then uses goal-driven automation to manage and optimize these resources. The result is ?service level automation?: Cassatt enables IT departments to deliver the application service levels to support and grow business ? even under tight budget restrictions ? by automatically leveraging previously wasted computing resources.