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SOA's Perfect Mate?: Page 7 of 10

The LiquidVM platform fills an important hole in Oracle's portfolio, giving Oracle a way to compete head-on with OS vendors. BEA's plan is to extend LiquidVM to its other applications, with editions of its WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic Service Bus shipping without operating systems at the same time as Liquid Operations Control. The acquisition likely means that LiquidVM will be used for virtual editions of Oracle's products, too.

At present, LiquidVM works only with VMware, but BEA says it plans to support Xen with a new release at the same time as LOC ships, and Hyper-V later in 2008. Oracle released a Xen-based virtualization product in November, so making LiquidVM work with Xen could be a top priority. Tying the two together exclusively, however, would negate one of LiquidVM's greatest selling points--that it can work with VMware, still by far the most popular hypervisor.

GIFT REGISTRIES

The registry doesn't have to be tied to an application platform, so standalone SOA governance vendors also could simplify Web service virtualization. The main player here is now Software AG, which bought competitor WebMethods last year. Software AG is merging WebMethods' Infravio registry with CentraSite, its own registry co-developed with Fujitsu. Rather than work directly with virtualization management, Software AG aims to expand the registry into a full configuration management database that can track all IT infrastructure, not just Web services, and share information with the main network management frameworks. "That's part of the reason we collaborated with Fujitsu on CentraSite," says Miko Matsumura, deputy CTO at Software AG.

VMware has very successfully promoted the concept of virtual appliances, which in some ways look like the opposite of SOA: Rather than breaking applications into small parts that can be rebuilt into new apps, a virtual appliance bundles an application with an operating system, usually a custom version of Linux, so that minimal configuration is necessary. But the two concepts can coexist happily. For example, in the past year, SOA security gateway vendors Vordel and Layer 7 Technologies have begun to ship their products as virtual appliances, a dramatic change given that security gateways usually are provided as hardware.

SOA security gateways began as XML firewalls, and this is still their most popular function. Like standard network firewalls, they are sold usually as physical boxes, often using dedicated XML acceleration chips. The shift to virtual appliances is driven partly by an aggressive XML strategy from Intel, which started promoting software XML processing as a way to boost demand for its general-purpose CPUs but in December actually entered the enterprise XML market itself, competing directly with some of its appliance-builder customers. However, the shift also is driven by the flexibility inherent in virtualization.