Enterprises are pursuing SOA and virtualization with great speed and at the same time, although perhaps in different departments. SOA is of interest mainly at the business and technical architecture levels, whereas virtualization is principally the concern of the datacenter management and applications systems deployment groups. These communities are often separated from each other in the organization and are frequently driven by separate goals. Business and IT want to achieve greater agility in their business processes and applications, whereas datacenter management wants to reduce costs by consolidating computing, storage and network infrastructure.

This paper establishes the technical links between these two popular developments in enterprise computing.