Virtual appliances enable dynamic SOA
Arvind Jain's Blog |
May 21, 2007 10:08 PM
|
Comments (2)
Aside from some of the convetional benefits of virtual appliances outlined in the following article - Virtual appliances cure appliance bloat at Virtualization Daily , they also have an interesting impact on SOA deployments. Consider composite SOA-based applications comprised of multiple independent but inter-dependent service components that are each deployed in their own application server clusters. If these applications are deployed on traditional, non-virtualized servers, then unexpected changes in workload traffic hitting individual service components would make it almost impossible to appropriately scale and size the hardware required for each service component. Do you allocate server capacity for each service component based on (1) current traffic, (2) historical peaks, (3) some unanticipated future overload projection, (4) or manually reconfigure your application server clusters by adding new instances on new hardware (right after you first install and tune all the software on that new box)? Now, instead, if these application server instances were each deployed in virtual appliances, where each virtual appliance was pre-configured and self-contained with all the software necessary to host the service component, then whenever the workload traffic jumps for that service component, a new virtual appliance could instantly be deployed onto spare capacity on the virtualized resource pool and easily be incorporated into the cluster of existing application server nodes hosting that service component. No longer would SOA admins have to pre-configure their server environment for unanticipated spikes, but rather adapt their deployment infrastructure dynamically based on actual workload requirements. Such is the power and capability enabled by WebLogic Server Virtual Edition, which is a middleware software appliance pre-configured to be deployed directly on the hypervisor without requiring installation or configuration of any software component with the virtual machine. Through the use of Liquid Operations Control, new WLS instances can quickly be deployed onto virtualized resource pools and incorporated into existing application server clusters to automatically scale running services.
Comments
Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first) | Post Comment
-
aha
Posted by: bigbang on May 29, 2007 at 5:24 PM
-
Now, instead, if these application server instances were each deployed in virtual appliances, where each virtual appliance was pre-configured and self-contained with all the software necessary to host the service component, then whenever the workload traffic jumps for that service component, a new virtual appliance could instantly be deployed onto spare capacity on the virtualized resource pool and easily be incorporated into the cluster of existing application server nodes hosting that service component. No longer would SOA admins have to pre-configure their server environment for unanticipated spikes, but rather adapt their deployment infrastructure dynamically based on actual workload requirements.
Posted by: dpeker on May 24, 2007 at 8:37 PM
|
