This week, I attended the VMware conference in San Francisco (VMWorld
2007). I attended several conferences and a lab related to virtual
appliances (http://www.vmware.com/appliances/). These are virtual
machines containing the OS and whatever software you may want to bundle
on top of it.
Due to licensing issues, almost nobody uses Microsoft Windows as the
base for their virtual appliance. Microsoft ties its license to the
hardware. This means that a license for the Microsoft OS must be
purchased for every physical machine where the virtual appliance may be
used. The license can not be bundled with the virtual appliance.
VMware has developed tools to create Linux-based virtual appliances.
They use a stripped down version of Ubuntu as the base OS. From what I
saw, livecd-tools offers a simpler and more powerful approach to create
an OS + application bundle. The virtual appliance creation involves
several steps and configuration files. Using livecd-creator, only one
configuration file is involved and only one command line is required to
create the iso image.
The only advantage of virtual appliances is persistence. If this could
be solved for livecd-tools, I foresee an increased interest from those
planning to create virtual appliances for the livecd-tools project.
Regards,
--
Patrice Guay
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