Patrice Guay wrote:
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.
Setting asside the persistence patch I'm working on, how about an
optional bootarg of rebootless_liveos_installer=go_for_it, which could
be a default isolinux menu entry ala how run-from-ram used to be. (or
just _the_ default if you choose to spin it that way)
Where the arg merely automatically invokes a rebootless installer
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-September/msg01042.html
Thus if you boot qemu(or vmware or whatever) with the "appliance master
livecd" attached as cdrom, and a fresh virtual disk as hard drive, you
get your newly provisioned persistent appliance.
$0.02...
(I'm sure some sort of cobbler+koan+revisor can probably do the same
thing in a different way. We're all headed in vaguely the same direction)
-dmc
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