This post begins a six-part commentary based on our white paper, Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development. It covers how service virtualization complements hardware virtualization with the ability to reduce cost and increase business agility across the entire software lifecycle. Each post will informally discuss some key points I'd like to make in conjunction with the paper.
Leading technology and business analysts cite the adoption of Virtualization as one of the most significant technology priorities of this decade. Virtualization at the hardware and data center level generates an almost immediate payback in with many millions saved IT operations costs. However, as we discuss in this paper, solely focusing on hardware Virtualization, we are leaving savings in both time and money on the table. In this post we will define virtualization in a general sense (traits both hardware virtualization and Service Virtualization share) and cover three main benefits.
Virtualization is the practice of simulating the behavior of a physical asset, such as a server or application, in a software emulator, and hosting that emulator in a virtual environment. The virtual environment behaves enough like the physical environment that communication with the emulated asset is just like the real thing. There are a number of value propositions associated with this practice.
- First, virtualization allows us to better manage physical assets. For example, many enterprises have troublesome configuration and change management issues. The additional abstraction of a virtual environment makes best practices around change and configuration management easier.
- Second, we can better leverage the capacity of physical assets with virtualization. Instead of every team acquiring its own hardware platforms for development, QA, and integration testing, the same servers can be leveraged between disciplines and even across teams. The goal here is to stem the tide of server proliferation.
- Third, virtualization helps organizations to be more agile. It is easier to reconfigure people than physical hardware resources. Virtualization increase the flexibility of the physical assets as we can better access the applications and services that we need immediately, and without time delays waiting on IT to switch servers or perform other reconfigurations.
In the next post we will look at how hardware virtualization sets the stage for added benefits from service virtualization.
The complete white paper can be down loaded in our Resources section: Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development.
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