Our company builds custom J2EE web solutions. At the moment, we use standard J2EE distribution mechanisms (ear/war archives). Application servers are generally administered by our clients' IT departments and since we do not have complete control over the environment, a lot of entropy can be introduced into the solution. For example:

• latest app. server patch not applied
• conflicting third party libraries inside the app. server root
• server runtime and tuning parameters not configured (for example, number of connections in database pool)

We are looking into using virtualization infrastructure for J2EE application distribution. Instead of sending the ear/war archive, we’d send image with application server node and our application preinstalled. Some of the benefits are same as using with using virtualization infrastructure in general, namely better use of hardware resources. For us, it reduces the entropy of hosting infrastructure - distributing VM should be less affected by hosting environment.

So far, the downside I see can be in application server licenses, here they will have to use dedicated servers for our solution, but this is generally already done that way. Also, there is a complexity with maintaining virtualization infrastructure, but this is often something IT departments have more experience with than with administering and fine-tuning J2EE solutions.

Anyone has experience with this model? What are the downsides? Will we not just replace one type of complexity with other?