LISA Virtualize for SOA: The Virtual Service Environment (VSE)
LISA Virtual Service Environment (or LISA VSE) allows teams to decouple themselves from dependency on live or unfinished systems and components throughout the lifecycle of building and testing SOA applications. LISA Virtualize models the expected functionality of any Service within SOA applications, whether that is a Web Service (WSDL), an integration layer such as an ESB, or an implementation layer such as an EJB, mainframe or database, and represents that Service virtually, with a high level of dynamic input and output capabilities and performance characteristics that simulate the real-world behaviors of complex systems. A Virtual Environment instance in LISA saves the team more than 90% of the cost of producing a replicated environment by other means, and allows teams to work in parallel instead of being constrained by each other's lifecycles, which increases agility and quality.
Enabling Service-Oriented Virtualization (SOV)
Service-Oriented Virtualization (SOV) is the IT strategy of capturing and/or simulating the real-world behavior of software assets that comprise an SOA application, thereby decoupling development and testing teams from dependency on deployed Services and their underlying implementation layers. The practice of SOV brings the value and reuse benefits of Virtualization in line with the expected agility and collaboration expected of SOA application development. LISA Virtual Service Environment (LISA VSE) enables both simulation of service assets that are not yet completed, and Emulation of the behaviors of live Services and their underlying implementations, providing a robust solution for increasing collaboration across the entire SOA software delivery lifecycle.
Don't just test virtually everything.
Test everything virtually with LISA's new VSE.
VSE offers unmatched value for testing changing implementations, by capturing and modeling Virtual Services within LISA that provide a robust behavioral simulation of the Service and its underlying implementation layers. With VSE, multiple teams can design and test services in parallel, without the burden of dependency on live service implementations or maintaining costly replicated test environments.
The Challenge
SOA may create profound value by integrating technologies around business goals. However SOA also potentially significantly increases the cost and effort associated with ensuring quality. Since an SOA approach usually arises from a need to collaborate between multiple business groups in a shared environment, an increased number of variables due to interconnectedness make testing very hard to share across teams.
Since SOA services are late binding by nature - coming together in production to deliver their combined functionality, business teams often give up on build and test automation - and only "acceptance test" against the live applications on the occasions when they are available. Or they resort to the costly and time-consuming process of provisioning and maintaining their own complete staging environment - including licensed copies of all the services and applications needed to validate the SOA application in absence of the live implementation. In this situation, simply virtualizing the hardware may save you the cost of another CPU, but it will not eliminate the high provisioning and maintenance costs.
How do you build and test your SOA, when your testing depends on so many of the other services and moving parts of a typical SOA? You can create a "mock" stub of a service that simply returns some set values and allows the test case to continue on its way. But not only is that a coding effort that is even less efficient than coding a test harness for the real object, it is not dynamic enough to be a truly useful development artifact for validating meaningful behavior.
How LISA Virtual Service Environment Works
Building your own functionality correctly can be hard to accomplish when live Service assets are not available. In runtime, your access to live production systems may be limited or forbidden. But you still need to test how your systems will interact with those Services as you build them.
LISA VSE can capture, then model the expected functionality of any Service within SOA applications, whether that is a web application UI, a Web Service (WSDL), an integration layer such as an ESB, or an implementation layer such as an EJB or database, and represent that Service virtually, with a high level of dynamic input and output capabilities that simulate real-world behaviors.
Benefits of LISA VSE
We propose the concept of Virtualized Services as an enabler for shared collaboration and quality across business teams and partners.
- Eliminates reliance on deployed services. Virtual Service Environment allows companies to break their dependencies on testing and validating against live services and implementation layers. Virtualization is no longer simply a discipline regarding the replication of hardware. Huge cost and efficiency savings are available through the virtualization of software components across groups collaborating on SOA.
- Provides concurrent team and partner development and testing. Parallel development and "anytime, anywhere" testing availability against intelligent Virtual Services in LISA unconstrains the team from access limitations, meaning SOA projects get done faster, at lower cost, with better test coverage.
- Huge cost savings over replicating, licensing and supporting complete test environments and systems.
- Easier test data management thanks to less volatility between teams contributing to the SOA effort
- Keeps dependent build and test instances more current. Capture and creation of a LISA Virtual Service is a fast, automated process in LISA, making it much easier to refresh than a managed testing environment.
iTKO Webinar Archive: Bringing Performance Validation "Into the Lifecycle" with a Virtual Service Environment (VSE) with Theresa Lanowitz, voke and John Michelsen, iTKO LISA. View the archive of the May 28, 2008 webinar.
iTKO Whitepaper: "Enterprise IT Performance Management with LISA Virtual Services Environment" How can we leverage leading Load & Performance testing tools such as Mercury LoadRunner, and Borland SilkPerformer in our test lab, by leveraging Virtualization to give IT a ready test bed at the speed of change in today's business? LISA Virtual Service Environment allows development, testing and performance teams to achieve better service levels, while saving as much as 90% of the cost of replicating each application environment. here >>.
Read all about SOV and Virtual Services in the comprehensive new whitepaper from iTKO: "Service-Oriented Virtualization: New Frontiers in Agility and Quality Beyond Physical Infrastructures". Read the iTKO Whitepaper on Service-Oriented Virtualization here >>.
For more information on Virtual Service Environment features, download the LISA Product Sheet. >>