A system and method can deploy and manage software services in virtualized and non-virtualized environments. The system provides an enterprise application virtualization solution that allows for centralized governance and control over software and Java applications. Operations teams can define policies, based on application-level service level agreements (SLA) that govern the allocation of hardware and software resources to ensure that quality of service (QoS) goals are met across virtual and non-virtualized platforms. The system use a rules engine that can compare administrator defined constraints with runtime metrics; generate events when a constraint is violated by a metric of the runtime metrics and generate events when a constraint is violated by a metric of the runtime metrics.