Last month we published Part One of a CTO Roundtable forum on virtualization. Sponsored by the ACM Professions Board, the roundtable features five experts on virtualization discussing the current state of the technology and how companies can use it most effectively. In this second and final installment, the participants address key issues such as choosing the most appropriate VM (virtual machine) platform, using virtualization to streamline desktop delivery, and using virtualization as an effective disaster-recovery mechanism.

Understanding how best to use

this emerging technology

PARTICIPANTS Photography by Jason Gardner

MACHE CREEGER (moderator) is a longtime technology industry veteran based in Silicon Valley. Along with being an ACM Queue columnist, he is the principal of Emergent Technology Associates, marketing and business development consultants to technology companies worldwide. TOM BISHOP is CTO of BMC Software.

Prior to BMC, he worked at Tivoli, both before and after its initial public offering and acquisition by IBM, and at Tandem Computers. Earlier in his career Bishop spent 12 years at Bell Labs’ Naperville, Illinois, facility and then worked for Unix International. He graduated from Cornell University with both bachelor’s and

master’s degrees in computer science. SIMON CROSBY is the CTO of the Virtualization Management Division at Citrix. He was one of the founders of XenSource and was on the faculty of Cambridge University, where he earned his Ph.D. in computer science. Crosby grew up in South Africa and has master’s degrees in applied probability and computer science.

GUSTAV is a pseudonym required by the policies of his employer, a large financial services company where he runs