According to this story at News.com BEA will be announcing plans to release WebLogic Server Virtual Edition in the first quarter of 2007. According to the story, this is a version of the company's WebLogic Java application server which does not need an operating system. Instead, it runs on a version of BEA's JRockit Java virtual machine modified to run directly on VMware's virtualisation hypervisor.

I was at VMware's VMworld 2006 conference at the beginning of the November and VMware discussed this collaboration with BEA as part of its broader virtual appliance initiative (see this post from Stephen O'Grady over at RedMonk for some detailed analysis of virtual appliances), so this news doesn't come as a total surprise.

The story quotes Guy Churchward, VP of WebLogic products at BEA:

Our goal was to double the utilization by running natively and to double the performance.

Removing the operating system and exploiting the consolidation benefits of virtualisation is certainly consistent with Guy's utilisation claims: I am not so sure about doubling the performance though given the overheads associated with a virtualisation layer (although perhaps BEA partner Azul Systems might be able to help out with its Java Compute Appliances)

Putting those promised benefits to one side, however, this announcement does raise a number of other questions in my mind. What implications does this have for BEA's licensing which has been based on the traditional per CPU (and per core) model? How is BEA going to deal with performance optimisation, given that all of the expertise developed by the company and its customers is based on the existence of an intervening operating system. Similarly for product support, patching and management. According to the News.com story BEA will be providing a management console, Liquid Operations Control, later next year so it will be interesting to see the extent to which it addresses some of these challenges. Unless it does, customers will struggle to realise the claimed benefits. Customers will also have to rethink, hopefully with some guidance from BEA, deployment architectures since the application server is only one component of any solution and in most scenarios those other components are not going to be virtual appliances (at least in the short term).

BEA clearly hopes to exploit the significant amount of interest in virtualisation to generate interest in the WebLogic Server and should also benefit from virtual appliance evangelism from market leader VMware. However, VMware is not the only virtualisation offering out there: there's Microsoft with Virtual Server and the Longhorn-era hypervison; XenSource with it's paravirtualisation; Sun with Solaris Containers and a range of offerings. According to the article, BEA does plan to support other virtualisation solutions. Aside from the significant engineering effort that entails, I am not so sure that the likes of Microsoft and Sun are going to be too happy with a proposition based on cutting out the operating system.

This is definitely something to watch and it is going to be interesting to see how the likes of IBM, Oracle and SAP respond.