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SOA's Perfect Mate?: Page 3 of 10

A truly agile infrastructure also needs VMs that can move quickly among servers, which entails the use of virtual storage and virtual networks. Most important, management capability must be integrated throughout the whole software stack. Virtualization vendors offer management tools that make VMs easier to set up and tear down, but they're not yet integrated with application management and SOA governance.

When it comes to SOA, virtualization can help in two main categories: middleware and the underlying services. Most products broadly classed as SOA fall into the first group, including enterprise service bus, management, governance, and security software. However, the greatest flexibility gains in SOA virtualization come from the second category, which includes Java and .Net servers as well as connectors to legacy platforms. This is both because services use more computing resources than middleware and because the demand for particular services is more likely to fluctuate.

Impact Assessment: SOA virtualization

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NOT QUITE A VIRTUAL SLAM DUNK

Application platforms such as those from BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, and Sun ought to be relatively easy to virtualize. First, they're already partly virtualized, meaning they run inside a Java or .Net virtual machine that isolates apps from the underlying operating system. This was done to simplify development by making applications more portable and secure, but it also should aid with agility. In addition, all these major application platform vendors, except BEA, sell OS-level virtualization technology (see table, p. 35), so they're in a position to help make the two work together better.

Combining OS-level virtualization with Java VMs is essentially a management challenge. At present, virtual instances of operating systems are created and managed by software that's bundled with hypervisors from vendors such as VMware and XenSource. This hypervisor-level software is good at understanding how a virtual server's resources relate to physical hardware, but it can't see inside applications.