Now experienced virtualization implementers, such as pharmaceutical company Pfizer, want to bring similar benefits to more of the IT stack. Pfizer's core business unit, Pfizer Global Pharmaceuticals, plans to virtualize more of the company's middleware, particularly its BEA Systems' WebLogic application servers, and use them as a flexible, dynamically allocatable resource.

Virtualization market leader VMware says its customers are already generating virtual machines that include the application server as well as operating system and application combinations. One of the benefits of doing so is the ability to rapidly generate more instances of an application server/application combination as demand for the application's services spike. But such combinations are not as flexible as treating the application server alone as a virtualized resource, as Pfizer wishes to do, says IT researcher Jonathan Eunice, at research and consulting firm Illuminata. A handful of new vendors are emerging with the capability of treating middleware as a resource in its own right rather than tying it to specific applications.

"We're very early in the process of virtualizing middleware," Eunice says. Vendor examples of the capability include Levanta's Release 3 software for IBM's zSeries and Intrepid M appliance for Linux on x86 servers, Cassatt's Collage and Web Automation Module, and IBM's WebSphere Extended Deployment.

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