Enterprise Virtualisation: Concept, Methodology, and Implementation

Enterprise Integration has been widely studied in the last decade and many of the results have been successfully applied in industry. Virtual enterprise is a newer research field to which researchers are paying more and more attention. However, from the viewpoint of enterprise development, enterprise integration and virtual enterprise are very different in both architecture and concept. In practice, enterprise integration is built in real space and virtual enterprise is built in virtual space. Hence, in the development of enterprises, an intermediate stage between enterprise integration and virtual enterprise must be studied. In this paper, a new concept, enterprise virtualisation is developed. Enterprise virtualisation is the link between enterprise integration and virtual enterprise. This paper discusses the basic architecture, basic activities and global model of enterprise virtualisation and their key elements. The methodologies of enterprise virtualisation are illustrated which involve resource virtualisation, management virtualisation and working environment virtualisation. A prototype of a virtualised enterprise has been successfully developed by the Department of Computing at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Through this prototype, Internet-based design and manufacturing has been implemented by resource sharing and reconfiguration.