Whitehorse & Virtualization

Microsoft has been touting a next generation designer for creating services and then facilitating the deployment of the services. As Microsoft puts it:
"When creating mission-critical software, application architects often find themselves communicating with their counterparts who manage data center operations. In the process of delivering a final solution, the application's logical design is often found to be at odds with the actual capabilities of the deployment environment. Typically, this communication breakdown results in lost productivity as architects and operations managers reconcile an application's capabilities with a data center's realities. In Visual Studio Whidbey, Microsoft will mitigate these differences by offering a logical infrastructure designer (Figure 19) that will enable operations managers to specify their logical infrastructure and architects to verify that their application will work within the specified deployment constraints."

The environment allows you to drag a service description to a physical node and drop it on the node to signify deployment.


At first this seemed like a great idea, but after spending some time with the IBM grid team they quickly reminded me that "services belong to the network, not a predefined physical node". Thus, hardcoding service locations to a physical node kills the benefit of virtualization. Well - I agree - you want to drag your service to a "service network" and there should be various sub-nets that are partitioned based on resources and capability.

But, I must admit... the Whitehorse demo sure looks cool... It is very "Microsoft".