I'm not sure where or when this conversation took place, but PC World had an interview with Simon Crosby, the CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix, about future plans to build on Hyper-V. It was an interesting read, and I think that it helps reinforce a point of view in that no one company is going to have a hold on the virtualization market, it is going to have to be about interoperability, as we have only just begun to mold whatever form this market may become.

Continue at Source: Citrix CTO Mum on Plans to Build on Microsoft's Hyper-V

In addition to the scheduled sessions for the 23rd and 24th,

http://xen.org/files/xensummitagenda.pdf

they have added a NEW! track to be held on the 22nd

http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix08/training/tutonefile.html#s4

Introduction to the Open Source Xen Hypervisor

Todd Deshane and Patrick F. Wilbur, Clarkson University; Stephen Spector, Citrix

Who should attend:

System administrators and architects who are interested in deploying the open source Xen hypervisor in a production environment. No prior experience with Xen is required; however, a basic knowledge of Linux is helpful.

The Xen hypervisor offers a powerful, efficient, and secure feature set for virtualization of x86, x86_64, IA64, PowerPC, and other CPU architectures, and has been used to virtualize a wide range of guest operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Solaris, and various versions of the BSD operating systems. It is widely regarded as a strategically compelling alternative to proprietary virtualization platforms and hypervisors for x86 and IA64 platforms.

Take back to work:

How to build and deploy the Xen hypervisor.

Topics include:

• Xen architecture overview
• Building a Xen hypervisor from Xen.org
• Installation and configuration
• Virtual machine creation and operation
• Performance: tools and methodology
• Best practices using Xen

Continue to Xen Summit: http://xen.org/xensummit/

===============================================================

CALL FOR PAPERS

3rd Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cluster and Grid Computing (VHPC'08) 

as part of Euro-Par 2008, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Island, Spain

===============================================================

Date: August 26-29, 2008

Euro-Par 2008: http://europar2008.caos.uab.es/ Workshop URL: http://xhpc.wu-wien.ac.at

SUBMISSION DEADLINE:

Abstracts: February 4, 2008

Full Paper: April 14, 2008 

Scope:

Virtual machine monitors (VMMs) are becoming tightly integrated with standard OS distributions, leading to increased adoption in many application areas including scientific educational and high-performance computing (HPC). VMMs allow for the concurrent execution of potentially large numbers of virtual machines, providing encapsulation, isolation, and the possibility for migrating VMs between physical hosts. These features enable physical clusters to be treated as "computation pools", where a variety of execution environments can be dynamically instantiated on the underlying hardware. VM technology is therefore opening up new architectures and services for HPC in cluster and grid environments, but consensus has not yet emerged on the best models and tools. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working on virtualization in HPC environments, with the goal of sharing experience and promoting the development of a research community in this emerging area.

The workshop will be one day in length, composed of 20 min paper presentations, each followed by 10 min discussion sections.

Presentations may be accompanied by interactive demonstrations.

The workshop will also include a 30 min panel discussion by presenters.

TOPICS 

Topics include, but are not limited to, the following subject matters:

- Virtualization in cluster and grid environments

- Workload characterizations for VM-based clusters

- VM cluster and grid architectures

- Cluster reliability, fault-tolerance, and security

- Compute job entry and scheduling

- Compute workload load leveling

- Cluster and grid filesystems for VMs

- VMMs, VMs and QoS guarantees

- Research and education use cases

- VM cluster distribution algorithms

- MPI, PVM on virtual machines

- System sizing

- Hardware support for virtualization

- High-speed interconnects in hypervisors

- Hypervisor extensions and utilities for cluster and grid computing

- Network architectures for VM-based clusters

- VMMs/Hypervisors on large SMP machines

- Performance models

- Performance management and tuning hosts and guest VMs

- Power considerations

- VMM performance tuning on various load types

- Xen/other VMM cluster/grid tools

- High-speed Device access from VMs

- Management, deployment of clusters and grid environments with VMs

- Information systems for virtualized clusters

- Management of system images for virtual machines

- Integration with relevant standards e.g. CIM, GLUE, OGF, etc.

PAPER SUBMISSION

Papers submitted to each workshop will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee and external reviewers. Submissions should include abstract, key words, the e-mail address of the corresponding author, and must not exceed 10 pages, including tables and figures at a main font size no smaller than 11 point. Submission of a paper should be regarded as a commitment that, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will register and attend the conference to present the work. 

Accepted papers will be published in the Springer LNCS series - the format must be according to the Springer LNCS Style. Initial submissions are in PDF, accepted papers will be requested to provided source files. 

http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html

Submission Link:

http://www.edas.info/newPaper.php?c=6123&

IMPORTANT DATES

February 4, 2008 - Abstract submissions due Full paper submission due: April 14, 2008 Acceptance notification: May 3, 2008 Camera-ready due: May 26, 2008

Conference: August 26-29, 2008

CHAIR

Michael Alexander (chair), WU Vienna, Austria Stephen Childs (co-chair), Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Jussara Almeida, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brasil Padmashree Apparao, Intel Corp., US Hassan Barada, Etisalat University College, UAE Volker Buege, University of Karlsruhe, Germany, Simon Crosby, Xensource, UK Marcus Hardt, Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany Sverre Jarp, CERN, Switzerland Krishna Kant, Intel Corporation, US Yves Kemp, University of Karlsruhe, Germany Naoya Maruyama, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan Jean-Marc Menaud, Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France José E. Moreira, IBM Watson Research Center, US Yoshio Turner, HP Labs Andreas Unterkircher, CERN, Switzerland Dongyan Xu, Purdue University, US

GENERAL INFORMATION

The workshop will be held as part of Euro-Par 2008, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Island, Spain.

Euro-Par 2008: http://europar2008.caos.uab.es/

If you are in Europe near Brussels and want to learn more about the open source solutions of virtualization, I recommend looking into a conference for January 22 - 23, 2008 at http://www.profoss.eu

Speakers currently scheduled for the event are from Sun, AMD, Novell, The 451 Group, Citrix, and many other leaders from open source projects. The event is sponsored by companies such as HP, Oracle, Unisys, and others.

Text from the Event Home Page:
Welcome to the Profoss website. If you're a professional user of Information and Communication Technologies, you'll be happy to know that Profoss brings you quality events where you will actually learn things, without commercial talks.

Profoss' objective is to spread objective information about the possibility to use professional solutions based on alternatives to proprietary and closed products. We focus on organising informative events, each dedicated to one subject, where professional IT people can get the information they need to make informed decisions. We also want to put you in contact with local professionals able to support you in your projects.

As you are smart enough to draw conclusions, we'll provide objective information so you can take the best decision based on your work environment, your experience, your knowledge, etc... We're not trying to sell you anything. We're only trying to bring you the most interesting information.

We don't think that to make an event interesting, it has to be expensive. This makes Profoss events accessible to employees of bigger companies as well as SMEs, where open solutions can have a significant added value.