CANCELLED DUE TO HURRICANE
Type of Talk: U

TCS Colloquium/Corporate Connection/FoCS

Speaker/Affiliation: Micha

el Malaby/ConocoPhillips

Date/Time: Thursday September 11 2008 4

:30 p.m.

Location: ACES 2.402

Host: FoCS

Talk Title:
Virtualization in the Enterprise Data Center:
What Happened To My Ser

ver?

Talk Abstract:
According to Burton Group server virtualizat

ion is the
most successful technological development in the data
ce

nter realm in recent history. This technology not only
helps companies

advance environmentally green initiatives
but also provides IT departm

ents the opportunity to improve
service delivery to customers at a redu

ced cost.

Virtualization significantly changes the traditional Windo

ws
server environment by introducing a level of abstraction to
the

relationship between the hardware and the operating
system. The server

running a critical application that was
once securely bolted into a rac

k (or neatly tucked under a
desk) no longer has a permanent physical ho

me and in fact
moves routinely among multiple hardware hosts in order t

o
find the ideal mix of compute resources required for the task
at

hand.

This abstraction from hardware also presents a myriad of
o

pportunities for infrastructure management which generally
fall into th

e categories of improved availability disaster recovery
capability fa

ster deployment and more efficient delivery of
resources. These opportu

nities must be weighed against the
risks that are inherent to highly le

veraged systems and new
risks associated with the technology.

My
presentation will provide an overview of the Windows server
virtualiza

tion effort at ConocoPhillips a Fortune 10 company with
over 3000 Wind

ows servers around the world. I will describe how
we chose which server

s to virtualize what we indentified as risks
how we overcame obstacle

s and finally what benefits we have
realized.