Providing Service Using A Virtualization Infrastructure

Abstract

Services could be designed to be simple, atomic, and transparent to potential consumers who interact with providers to attain desired outcome. Providing the desired service, though, may involve a series of complex operations such as accessing multiples databases owned by multiple parties residing in multiple locations, complex queries to obtain desired outcome, transforming these queries for proper display, displaying the outcome in a format comprehensible to the consumer, et cetera. The development of service-oriented architecture (SOA) or service-oriented computing (SOC) allows organizations to exploit the services that may or may not belong to them to provide customized services to potential customers. Virtualization, viewed as the separation of a service request from the underlying physical delivery of that service, allows such services to be provided in a flexible and cost-effective manner. Virtualization is also seen as one of the green ITs which can help reduce infrastructure and maintenance cost especially for the organizations that may not be able to afford big capital investment upfront. In this paper we make a case for integrating SOA and virtualization technologies to provide desired services to the consumer in highly a flexible and cost effective manner.