virtual appliance

Overheard - JeOS and VM sprawl

“If you are feeling the pangs associated with VM sprawl, I strongly suggest a healthy slug of JeOS each morning and once again in the afternoon to clear your system of the painful bloating that is brought on by virtualizing the general purpose OS.” Billy Marshall Is JeOS a Tonic for VM Sprawl?

JeOS is an acronym for “just enough operating system.”  It’s pretty much what it sounds like and it’s handy for building virtual appliances.  You include just the parts of the operating system that are required to support a particular application. The idea is to make the appliance smaller and more stable than it would be if it was running under a full-sized general purpose operating system.  It’s pronounced “juice.”

Overheard: The future of SaaS is in appliances?

Today, virtual appliances are becoming a de-facto means of software distribution and have spawned a new type of business — the virtual appliance vendor. Along with software vendors and virtualization software companies, appliance vendors are putting in the extra effort to streamline the distros that power the apps. So, for example, Bugzilla, the popular bug tracking app, is available as a 2.4MB download tarball from Mozilla, as well as a 150MB appliance from appliance vendor Jumpbox. Mathematically, this is 62.6 times the size of the app, but in 150MB you’re also getting an operating system, stripped to the bone and optimized to run only that particular app. Mayank Sharma, A virtual appliance primer

Am still trying to figure out why we won’t be using virtual appliances for just about everything and how the distribution model fits in with SaaS.

Overheard: A virtual appliance isn’t something you buy on Second Life

So what is a virtual appliance? A virtual appliance is a virtual machine that can be distributed (like any file) and deployed onto some hypervisor (a server that runs virtual machines). Because a virtual appliance is an entire virtual machine, the appliance developer has control of the entire aspect of the machine, from operating system to window themes to startup procedures. Josh Suereth, Virtual Appliance - Not a Toaster on Second Life