BEA sings praises of virtualised SOA

BEA will start shipping its WebLogic Server Virtual Edition software in June

BEA Systems has announced that it will start shipping its WebLogic Server Virtual Edition software at the beginning of June. 

Guy Churchward, BEA's vice president of WebLogic products, said at a meeting with reporters that the release will be followed by WebLogic Liquid Operations Control in the third quarter of this year.

The visions behind virtualisation and service oriented architectures (SOAs) are a match made in heaven, argued Churchward. But he warned that the two technologies currently lack proper integration, leading to poor server utilisation.

"Our customers were saying that they need to get better server utilisation. They literally said to us: 'You are the Java experts. Figure out how to make Java play better in virtualisation, because it sucks,'" he said.

Virtualisation offers a way to run multiple operating systems on a single physical server, allowing for increased server utilisation.

SOAs are designed to build and maintain applications in an enterprise. Rather than designing each application from the ground up, SOA allows developers to reuse code between departments and combine resources from all over the company. Each service offers a single functionality such as log-in or currency conversion. Services are then combines to create the actual application.

But because services inside an SOA will be used across multiple departments, the demand for a service will be much harder to predict. And a slowdown in a single service will affect performance across all applications that use that service.

Currently, applications typically run on a dedicated server. But once an application is divided into several services, each of them can run on a dedicated server.

Virtualisation can benefit SOAs because it allows a company to quickly add resources to a service that is suffering from peak demand, thereby guaranteeing performance.

"If you are virtualising an application, you are almost blinkered to the application's needs," said Churchward.

"But if you are in a SOA environment, where you have multiple parts that make up an application, you have to look at each piece and see what the ripple effect is."