Virtualization Daily

Over on his ZDNet blog, Phil Windley is exploring the concept of virtual appliances.

I believe virtualization will have a big impact on regular computer users as well as how companies will do their computing. Lately, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about virtual appliances.

He’s giving a few virtual appliances a bit of tire kicking to see where things stand. Not all has been rosy.

I had a few problems with the appliance I downloaded, and that brings up the chief downside of virtual appliances: when something goes wrong, you're debugging someone else's install, at best, and just stuck, at worst. I was just stuck, as it turns out, since VirtualAppliances.net only offer SSH access to their appliances if you pay.

Of course, the real win comes when you move beyond simple LAMP stacks and into applications like telephony or CRM where the configuration and dependencies can be quite difficult. Need a SugarCRM appliance or a Asterisk appliance? Just download them.

Minor issues really and I’ve seen the same problem with the VirtualAppliances.net LAMP stack and I’m sure it will get worked out quickly. Overall his conclusion is still positive.

While, machine image virtual appliances, like the LAMP-stack, will likely remain something that is freely available, I expect the market for specialty virtual appliances to develop. VMWare, for example, “certifies” some of their virtual appliances, providing businesses some assurance that the appliance will work as advertised. We’ll also hosting providers that provide virtual environments for the appliance of your choice and computer manufacturers like Dell offering machines with virutal machine monitors pre-installed.

I suspect that last sentence is supposed to say “We’ll also see hosting providers”. That’s something that I definitely agree with. I’ve been talking a bit about this concept as what I call “bring your own virtual machine hosting” (BYOVM). Amazon EC2 is sort of this kind of service, currently they make it pretty easy to bring your own VM, but taking it away is a little harder. All of this will emerge though and the flexibility for how we deploy applications is going to increase considerably when it does.

BTW, Phil’s also running a poll, similar to the one I just concluded, asking the question, “Where is your company on virtual appliances?”. So check out the post to contribute.