Every few years a new hype or revolution emerge in the IT world. Over the past few years virtualization technologies and cloud computing have grown in popularity and they are seen as the next paradigm shift. However, as for most new paradigm which are rapidly adopted by industry, there may be confusion between the concepts and their implementation, the principles and the actual services, the corporate and the commercial approaches, the hypes and hopes.

This series of three lectures aims at clarifying these possible ambiguities by presenting the virtualization concepts, its application to the Cloud metaphore, via the presentation  and demonstration of  different virtualization technologies.

Targeted audience :

This series of three lectures targets any computer scientists or physicists interested in better understanding the virtualization and cloud concepts.

Theme: Virtualization and Clouds
Lecture: Virtualization: what it is, how it works

A few questions addressed in the lecture

Thursday 3 March

10:15 11:10

Lecture
1

Luigi Gallerani

Description

Virtualization has become over the past years a popular approach to try and use more efficiently computing resources.

In this lecture, a general overview of what virtualization is and what it can provide is given.  Server virtualization is a particular mode of implementation which is explained. In order to provide a clearer picture of the features and benefits of virtualization and to usefully complement the theoretical explanations, several practical demos will be presented to the audience.

Audience and benefits
Anyone interested in better understanding what virtualization is and  to see practical features through demos is invited to attend.

Pre-requisite
No prerequisite knowledge is needed to follow this lecture

Thursday 3 March

11:20 12:15

Lecture 2

Server Virtualization at work

Luigi Gallerani

Description

After the introduction to virtualization in lecture 1, this second lecture focuses on server virtualization through practical demos.

Participants will see on a demo how to create a robust, redundant and high-availability cluster of Virtual Servers. They will see how to connect this cluster to multiple virtual networks, how to life migrate a server from one host to another one and how to manage and monitor a huge number of virtual servers in a real production environment.

Audience

Anyone interested in today's server virtualization possibilities and in the future trends.

Pre-requisite
A basic knowledge of linux shell will help to fully benefit from the lecture.

Thursday 3 March

14:00 - 14:55

Lecture 3

Unweaving Clouds: Principles and Practice

Belmiro Moreira

Description

Cloud computing has been a buzzword for many years but more than ever it continues to attract and keep the interest of both the computer community and businesses. In this lecture we discuss the concepts, applications and benefits of Cloud Computing. As an example of a Cloud Computing application at CERN, we present "lxcloud".

Audience
This lecture targets all participants with interest in Cloud Computing and virtualization

Pre-requisite

No special prior knowledge of the topic is required to benefit from this lecture.