Are Windows desktops costing you too much money to manage and upgrade? The answer is to treat them as another piece of virtual infrastructure. Kiss Windows configuration drift goodbye with the promise of a fresh OS and applications provisioned out of the golden image every time you log on. Of course there's the tiny issue of latency between the machine room and you, but don't worry! We have half a dozen protocols that can fix that...

Virtualization is the most radical transformation to enterprise infrastructure in years; there's not much argument there. But there's little else we can agree on. Which hypervisor is best? Where else in the stack can virtualization techniques confer real benefits? What unintended consequences come along with wholesale adoption of virtualization? And perhaps most importantly, who, ultimately, will benefit?

Development and test environments have traditionally been administered in a black-box fashion by software development teams; as such, they have escaped the rigor with which production environments are scrutinized and tuned. Virtualization technology stands to radically change this situation for the better and provide time, cost and personnel savings to software development organizations. Join 451 analyst Vishwanath Venugopalan, as he presents findings from a major new report.

In all things, there is a right way and a wrong way. Virtualization is, in our view, the right way to encapsulate legacy applications and underpin new service offerings. If there's a wrong way, it's service-oriented architecture as originally conceived. This panel examines ways to reinvent SOA and realize its promise in a freshly virtualized world.

This presentation will focus on the challenges facing customers in today's complex virtualization market - with multiple vendors offering a wide range of solutions to meet a wide variety of business challenges. With virtualization moving far beyond the single vendor, simple consolidation model, customers are increasingly looking for flexibility, ease of management, and interoperability. Katrinka and Benny will outline recent developments in technology, standards and product portfolios that are disrupting the virtualization market with solutions that span from server to desktop, and from appliance to cloud.

With cost considerations, server consolidation and disaster recovery pushing server virtualization into mainstream datacenter operations, people are beginning to ponder the security impact of this transformation. Projects like Blue Pill and SubVirt have demonstrated the possibility of creating undetectable malware that runs inside the hypervisor. Traditional security approaches don't always work for hypervisor security, which is problematic when one considers the vulnerability of guest operating systems. Join The 451 Group's Enterprise Security Practice head Nick Selby as he and a panel of experts explore new methods for hardening virtual servers.

Server virtualization upends the datacenter and creates new opportunities to rebuild the storage back-end. Desktop virtualization replaces expensive back-end gear with cheap client storage. Both accelerating trends have tremendous and sometimes contradictory consequences for storage vendors. What is the road ahead? How should storage vendors and users change their products, practices and strategies to maximize storage potential in a virtualized world?

Even as virtualization revolutionizes computing inside enterprises, hosting and cloud computing providers are leveraging virtualization technologies to create the next generation of hosted servers. These server products typify on-demand computing, with ultrafast provisioning and upgrades at will. How can enterprises integrate these hosted offerings for stand-alone projects and 'cloudbursting' for overflow? How should virtualization vendors look at hosting and cloud computing providers – friend or foe? The foremost expert in hosted cloud computing, Antonio Piraino, addresses this issue head-on.