Rene W. Schmidt, VMWare

Track:   Service Oriented Computing (SOA)

Abstract: In service-oriented computing, a central aspect is to build components that can be integrated and orchestrated into services that have identifiable business relevance. Each component exposes a well-defined interface, which allows easy repurposing when business priorities change. These advances in software architecture have an impact across the entire software lifecycle from development, assembly, deployment and, not least, ongoing operation. To fully utilize this model, a flexible datacenter operational model that allows dynamic service provisioning and repurposing must be adopted.
Virtual machines (in the VMware sense) are a complete and highly scalable software encapsulation of a physical x86 server. In this talk, we will discuss how the encapsulation and resource-management features of virtualization technology can be used as a core foundation for managing services. The decoupling of services from the underlying hardware opens the possibility that business-level goals and policies can be linked to lower-level resource and configuration controls to enforce alignment of IT operations with business objectives. We will argue that the central technology required to achieve this alignment is a concept we call a resource pool. We describe work that implements fully dynamic resource pools and discuss additional pieces needed to achieve true business service management.