Service Virtualization & Managed Services Engine

Service Virtualization has now become a much discussed about topic in the SOA arena.Recently I came across a paper by Aaron Skonnard of Pluralsight on this topic.A very concise and self explanatory paper obviously with a focus on Microsoft Platform based implementation.Inspired by that I thought of sharing my understandings too (though at very initial stage)

So what is virtualization?It is the mechanism of abstracting the underlying details of any computing resource like server,network,storage etc from it's user.For example,server virtualization hides the details like the physical identity of the server,number of CPU etc from the end user.Similar concept can be applied to the services as well where the service consumers will work with virtualized version of the service without even knowing where and how it is hosted and other implementation details.