Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and virtualization seem made for each other, but management, both the software kind and the human kind needs to improve before the coupling can reach its full potential.

Virtualization offers the ability to not only ensure service availability and scalability, which is often touted as its main selling point for SOA, but also provides the ability to quickly update and change services without disrupting applications, says John Michelsen, chief architect at testing vendor iTKO Inc. While he said he is actively recommending virtualization to his customers doing SOA, he offers the one caveat that lack of effective virtualization management software and skills make it hard to track and find services running on numbers of virtual machines in an enterprise environment.