At VMworld 2006, one of the takeaways from the event was that the operating system shouldn't matter. BEA Systems is taking that to heart, and in fact, they seem to be cutting out the operating system from the picture altogether. The company announced a ground-breaking entry into the virtualization market accompanied with an aggressive strategy and product roadmap aimed at Java environments. At BEAWORLD 2006 in B At VMworld 2006, one of the takeaways from the event was that the operating system shouldn’t matter. BEA Systems is taking that to heart, and in fact, they seem to be cutting out the operating system from the picture altogether. The company announced a ground-breaking entry into the virtualization market accompanied with an aggressive strategy and product roadmap aimed at Java environments.At BEAWORLD 2006 in Beijing, the company said the move underscores the growing industry trend of system virtualization, the bundling of software applications with optimized OS functionality to run on hardware-independent virtual infrastructure and thus the decoupling of the software from the hardware through virtualization. As part of the virtualization strategy, BEA’s aggressive product roadmap includes: Liquid VM – A virtualization-optimized Java Virtual Machine that is designed to enable Java apps to run directly on a virtualization layer. Liquid VM today works with the VMware ESX Server hypervisor to run a Java application. It goes a step beyond basic virtualization by decreasing the system stack footprint to help enable even greater consolidation. Liquid VM is a foundational technology of BEA’s virtualization-enabled product offerings and will be initially supported on VMware’s ESX Server and the full VMware Infrastructure product line. Executives claim support for other virtualization technologies will follow. WebLogic Server Virtual Edition (WLS-VE). Scheduled to be available in the first half of 2007, this is the first product on BEA’s roadmap to be launched. It is designed to combine the foundation of WebLogic Server with BEA’s Liquid VM, the virtualization-optimized JVM, and can enable Java applications to run more efficiently on virtualized hardware. This design can improve hardware utilization, which in turn, can lower the hardware costs per application. The software can also make it easier to add hardware resources to a live application, thus allowing the application’s capacity to scale with evolving business needs. WebLogic Liquid Operations Control (WL LOC). Currently scheduled for Summer 2007 availability, LOC is designed to enable management and control of Java applications running on virtualized infrastructure. This can allow handling of Java applications as software “appliances” that can be rapidly provisioned and augmented with processing power and memory in step with evolving needs; policy-driven automation of provisioning tasks; and visibility into runtime behavior of applications. The combination of WL LOC and Liquid VM is designed to extend and integrate existing system-level virtualization offerings by increasing the performance and utilization of Java applications on virtualized hardware, and integrating the resource management and provisioning of the Java and virtualized system-level infrastructure. In addition, WL LOC will provide significant management benefits for all Java applications in a virtualized environment-not just those running on Liquid VM or WebLogic Server. “The forthcoming releases of WebLogic Server Virtual Edition and WebLogic Liquid Operations Control are designed to essentially redefine the very core of how application infrastructure interacts with and depend upon the layers below them,” said Wai Wong, executive vice president products at BEA. “WLS-VE is designed to effectively eliminate performance overhead, reduce configuration complexity and increase system optimization. These new capabilities can extend WebLogic’s leadership role in the market and solidify the product family’s position as the foundation for SOA.” Software Development