SOA and Virtualization: How do They Fit Together?

by BEA Systems and VMWare

01/30/2008

Industry discussion on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and virtualization positions them as separate, though related, topics today. Because of the wealth of public discussion on each technology, IT managers may wonder whether they are in any sense connected to each other. In fact, the technologies that come with virtualization can be seen as the key enablers for the flexibility promised by SOA. This paper establishes the technical links between these two popular developments in enterprise computing.

Enterprises are pursuing both of these developments with great speed and at the same time, although perhaps in different departments. SOA is of interest mainly at the business and technical architecture levels, whereas virtualization is principally the concern of the datacenter management and applications systems deployment groups. These communities are often separated from each other in the organization and are frequently driven by separate goals. Business and IT want to achieve greater agility in their business processes and applications, whereas datacenter management wants to reduce costs by consolidating computing, storage and network infrastructure.

These seemingly disparate concerns meet at the enterprise architect's, chief information officer's or systems release manager's desk, where the mapping of SOA-based applications to the virtualization platform needs to be quite clear. The deployment platform of choice is fast becoming a virtual one, so that enterprise architects have to think about mapping their newly-developed SOA services to that virtual platform. The enterprise architect's position is often where the development teams, pursuing their SOA strategy, meet the deployment teams, who are busy implementing virtualization in the datacenter and consolidating. The big questions then center on how SOA-based systems can best be mapped to a virtualized implementation, what the connection points are between them, and how one can make optimal use of the other.

This paper lays out the basics for how these two developments in the industry, and the technologies underlying them, can complement each other, if implemented correctly.