Recently I had been to Virtualization conference, “Convergence 08“ held at IIT Bombay. This is the first ever technical event targeted at virtualization held so far in India with talks from industry experts in the field. Over 200 delegates from various organizations attended this two day event that focused on current research activitives in Virtualization.

The conference started with keynote from Prof. D.M.Dhamdhere one of the most respected professor at IIT, Bombay. Then the Chinmay from Vmware, talked about the Server Virtualization, delving deeper into the key features of various virtual appliances produced by Vmware over the years.

Next, Naresh Sehgal from Intel gave an very insightful, informative presentation on hardware virtualization. He explained how the hot virtualization waves forced the hardware vendors like Intel, AMD to support virtualization at processor level thus greatly reducing the tasks performed by hypervisors. This was the best presentation of the conference and he was kind enough to send me the soft copy of presentation on request.

Next day, we had presentation from IIT Bombay computer team on performance issues on Virtualiaztion using Xen. They explained about various aspects including schedulers, I/O processing mechanism built into Xen hypervisor. Also the presentations by Amit Shah & Symantec’s Anurag were useful. Apart from this, there were talks on storage virtualization, data virtualization, I/O virtualization etc which helped us to gain better understanding of varieties of Virtualization technologies evolving today.

Over all, it was worth attending such a highly technical event with insightful presentations from the knowledgable speakers.

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