Virtualization of the Middle Tier

It's been interesting to see the big push for virtualization of the middle tier.    If you look at the continuing growth of SpringSource and Oracle Fusion Middleware, you can expect to see a number of presentations at VMWorld and Oracle Open World.

I'm currently spending a lot of time looking at building virtualized infrastructures for the middle tier.  I'm  seeing the tremendous demand of customers for the evolution of their physical middle-tier environments into virtualization.  Strong customer demands in this area include:

• Creation of virtualized apps that are a suite of virtual machines containing, database, application server and LDAP suites that can be deployed with the click of a button.
• Creation of development virtualized environments where it is very easy to deploy multiple development environments in Linux, Windows, for test environments.  Very easy for developers to create snapshots that they can roll back to.
• Deployment of large sets of virtualized desktops using products like VMware View.

Tools provided by VMware such as Lab Manager, vCenter Update Manager, Host Profiles and Baselines make it very easy to keep systems synchronized and agile for quickly changing development environments.  Once a virtualized environments are set up for middle-tier applications, its great to see customers saying things like "wow, its amazing how we every survived without virtualization".  Lots of great success stories in this area.