iForum Track breakout sessions from this year's Citrix Synergy conference are being made available to you. That's right, if you missed out on attending the Synergy event in Houston, don't despair, because Citrix will be offering access to the content with on demand streaming video. This year's breakout sessions offer detailed technical content, best practices, demos and helpful tips on Citrix products as well as information you need to optimize and enhance your existing environment.

Continue to Synergy on Demand

Find and meet up with other Citrix Technology Professionals like yourself who are interested in personal collaboration, creating a Citrix Community, or hosting a Citrix User Group.

MeetUp is a site dedicated to getting people to meet. How does it work? You have an interest, Citrix, find a local group, and meet up with people who share in your interest of Citrix. You can either start a meet up or you can find people who have started a meet up in your area or the world if you wish.

You can also go to http://citrix.meetup.com to Find Citrix Users and Citrix MeetUps near you...

Here is a map showing meet up possibilities for Citrix

Here is a list of areas to choose meet up possibilities from by City for Citrix

Here is a user in Bedford, MA, USA who is looking for a Citrix MeetUp

I would love for everyone to be able to attend Citrix Synergy, Citrix Geek Speak, and Citrix BarCamp, but I also know that this is not always possible for many reasons. If you are one who cannot attend, don't think that because you can't go that you can't be a part of it all. It is you and the many other great Citrix Technology Professionals who make this industry the greatest one to be a part of. You can now find other Citrix Technology Professionals wishing to MeetUp and start your own TechTalk, GeekSpeak, or BarCamp in which you and your peers can pick the topics and agenda, and who knows maybe we can grow the Citrix Community in many new directions we never thought possible.

Here is a list of links to some upcoming Citrix Community Events:

Citrix Synergy
Geek Speak at Citrix Synergy
BarCamp at Geek Speak

Here is a list of Citrix Community sites:

Citrix Community
Citrix Community Blogs
Citrix Community Forums
Citrix Developer Forums Citrix Support Forums
Frameworkx Community Blogs

The Best Selling Author
Nicholas Carr, the best-selling author of "Does IT Matter?" and "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google," challenges the conventional wisdom about business and technology. The former executive editor of Harvard Business Review, Carr has been called an "exceedingly lucid" speaker by Computerworld, and his featured keynote at Citrix Synergy promises to spark lively debate.

The Strategist
Count on Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft Server and Tools Business, to offer expert insight into the future direction of information technology, which Microsoft calls Dynamic IT. Muglia oversees a vast pipeline of innovation and is equally comfortable in the business and technical fields. He'll share strategies for making IT a stronger partner to business - using tactics he has honed through extensive experience working closely with his teams and Microsoft customers to drive his division's growth and technology leadership.

The Architect
Vishal Sikka, chief technology officer of SAP AG, leads the company's technology and architecture strategy across its product portfolio and its forward-thinking efforts around emerging technologies.  Sikka plays a leading role in the long-term direction of SAP's research efforts and is chartered with mapping SAP's next-generation architecture.  Sikka will share his perspective on business agility, adaptable business processes and how virtualization will accelerate innovation in business.
 
The Visionary
Known for creating fireworks onstage, Mark Templeton is the face of Citrix. As president and CEO, he helped propel Citrix into the business and technology spotlight. Templeton has his finger on the pulse of market trends, and his keynotes offer a compelling look at the cutting-edge technologies that drive customer growth. At Citrix Synergy, Templeton will offer his perspective on what the future holds for application delivery and its potential to impact the way business is conducted.

The Emmy Award-Winning Comedian
Dana Carvey, best known for his flawless impersonations, will headline the closing night party. A repertory member of Saturday Night Live (SNL) for seven seasons, Carvey is best known for his characters the Church Lady, Weekend Update's Grumpy Old Man, and Hans, of the Hans and Franz bodybuilding duo. In addition, Carvey received widespread praise for his uncanny and exaggerated comedic impersonations of political figures such as former president George Bush. Carvey has had a variety of television and movie roles, including a starring role as Garth, Wayne Campbell's "Excellent Cohost," in Wayne's World. In 1993, Carvey won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program for SNL.

This is where the light dims, clouds start forming, light beams down from the sky, and it's all focused on you!

The Participant
Born as a user conference more than 10 years ago, it is the Attendees that are going to play a direct role in this year's event.
This is your chance to be a participant and not just an attendee, you will be able to pick the topics and facilitate the sessions.
You have a chance to play an active role in your conference experience by being part of Geek Speak and BarCamp

Geek Speak
You pick the topics, you run the discussions, you call the shots! Join tech geeks, analysts and bloggers at the ultimate "unconference".

BarCamp
You are the host. BarCamps are user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants.

Plus, you'll get a chance to check out the cool tools and gadgets-part of the event's "Tips, Techniques, Tools, and Toys" theme.

Here is a list of sites for you to really dive in and let Virtualization, Networking and Application Delivery meet You!

Citrix Synergy
Geek Speak at Citrix Synergy
BarCamp at Geek Speak
Citrix Community Blog

Between the Thanksgiving holiday and the migration to the new blog site on Citrix.com, I have fallen a bit behind on posting iForum videos with alliance partners. Here is the next one - DataCore Software. I haven't yet had any personal experience with DataCore Software, but I have heard very good things about it. It is ironic that I haven't, since their headquarters is about a block from the Citrix HQ in Ft. Lauderdale.

Virtual Strategy Magazine does this interview with George Teixeira, the CEO and Co-Founder of DataCore. George says during the interview "One of the big things we've got is a low cost entry point $1000 SAN that allows them to basically take any pc and transform it into a storage server to support XenDesktop and XenServer as well the Citrix platform." A $1000 SAN definitely piques my interest.

I found this video on their website that covers their overall solution.

I also found this podcast from David Marshall of Infoworld that covers DataCore (and DevonIT) from iForum.

According to this white paper from the Taneja Group "DataCore is the Perfect Compliment to Virtualized Server Infrastructure". I am going to work on getting some more technical info directly from DataCore and post it to the blog.

I would like to hear from any users of DataCore Software to get their opinion and hands on experiences with the software.

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The next partner from the XenSource Pavillion at iForum I would like to highlight is PlateSpin.

Virtual Strategy Magazine also did a video interview with PlateSpin at iForum. In this video Paul Sheridan of PlateSpin covers PowerRecon and PowerConvert.

PowerConvert is described as a migration tool. On the surface, it looks like a simple P2V tool. if you dig down deeper, you quickly find PowerConvert can do a lot more. here is a list I found of all the different types of migrations this tool supports.

P2V

- V2P

- V2V

- P2P

It can do this over the LAN or WAN, and can even do live incrementation migration at the file and block level. According to the product page on their website, this can happen while the server is live and running. I am extremely impressed with the capabilities of PowerConvert. This looks to be an incredibly useful tool for those who are moving to server virtualization. I would love to hear from any readers who have personal experience using PowerRecon in your own environment.

The other product is PowerRecon. I have to admit, the name of this product when I first heard it had me thinking of monitoring voltage on server power supplies. Here is a list of what the product actually does - automates the collection of server inventory, workload and resource utilization data and gives you the ability to do forecasting and trending of workloads. In light of that explanation, the product names makes a bit more sense. The next question for me was, wwhat does this have to do with server virtualization? Since a big part of the dirving force for server virtualization is under utilization of current server resurces, it makes a lot of sense to have a tool to know what the current levels of cpu utilization are for your server farm. The Virtual Infrastructure edition does the same thing for VM power by VMWare. I do not know yet if a XenServer Edition is forthcoming, but I will ask.

PlateSpin recently did a webinar on PowerRecon. Here is the link:

http://www.platespin.com/downloads/downloaddetails.aspx?fid=370

If you have experience using Platespin products, please post your experiences in the comments.

I have found several more partners videos to highlight. I will get to those over the next several days.

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One booth I visited in the XenSource Pavilion is Marathon Technologies. I can recall recommending their high availability solution to a number of customers back in the late 90 when I was still an independent consultant. Back then, the solution was hardware and software based. Now, Marathon solution is a completely software based high availability solution and runs on industry standard hardware. Marathon announced a new XenSource specific solution at VMWorld, and won Best of VMWorld for New Technolgoies . John Bara from XenSource (now part of the Virtualization Management Group at Citrix) said this about Marathon:

By integrating everRun with XenEnterprise, Marathon is enabling customers of any size to get simple, enterprise-grade virtualization solutions with FT-class application availability, said John Bara, vice president of marketing at XenSource. is another example of how XenSource is working with partners to ensure XenEnterprise seamlessly integrates as the virtualization platform for a wide-range of high-performance, best-in-class solutions._

In the demo I saw, the v-Available everRun solution from Marathon was able to handle a failure of a hard drive one side of the link and a network card on the other side and continue running. Unlike many other virtualization HA solutions, Marathon solution does not restart the VM after a failure on one side of the link. The Marathon is always running and can handle the failure of a single component of either side, or an entire VM on one side without any downtime. It makes for a very impressive demo.

That demo was of two servers on a LAN. The solutions also works over a WAN. I am still trying to get more info from Marathon Technologies to nail down what are the specific WAN requirements for this new offering. According to the Marathon FAQ the Split Site solution ( a different product) requires 10 ms of latency or less. Assuming has the same requirement, you cannot replicate a VM from a datacenter on the east coast to one on the west coast. According to a few docs I found on the Marathon website, the limit is 100 miles.

Here is a video I found on YouTube of an interview done by Virtual Strategy Magazine.

There was a virtualization webinar last week with Marathon CTO Jerry Melnick, the CTO of Citrix Virtualization Management Group Simon Crosby, and Chris Wolf from the Burton Group. Here is the webinar link .

Marathon has an excellent High Availability solution for virtual machines running on Citrix XenServer. If HA is requirement for you, check it out.

I have several more partner solutions to blog abut as I get time.

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