Service Oriented Virtualization
SOA and Virtualization are currently considered to be two separate disciplines, but they no longer need to be. SOA offers the enterprise the benefits of increased agility and cost efficiency in terms of application development, reuse, and making connections across heterogeneous applications and business partners. Virtualization is creating some real cost benefits for the data center in terms of hardware, but it is still leaving most of the potential efficiency and cost savings on the table for SOA. How can teams Virtualize to improve the quality and time-to-market of SOA functionality, which does not necessarily reside under a centralized team's control? The extended organization must break the barriers of connecting these two strategies by Virtualizing their shared Behaviors, thereby multiply the expected value of virtualization.
This paper proposes the concept of Service-Oriented Virtualization, or SOV: the strategy of simulating the behavior of deployed software assets, and the synthetic construction of those not in existence, that make up an enterprise SOA application. Real world examples of SOV will be discussed, including how LISA Virtual Service Environment (VSE) can be used to create a test and development bed for more agile and cost-effective SOA collaboration through Virtual Services.





