Virtualization Daily

Along with the release of the VMWare Virtual Appliance Marketplace, VMWare has also announced a certification program for virtual appliances.

This is actually really good to see, because a lot of the things VMWare calls virtual appliances, really aren’t.

VMware is committed to ensuring that customers have the best possible virtual appliance experience through the VMware Certified Virtual Appliances program. All VMware Certified Virtual Appliances will go through the same battery of tests to ensure consistency and completeness of the virtual appliance. All appliances will be tested to verify that they work with VMware Infrastructure and have all of the necessary documentation to assist new users in either evaluating the virtual appliance or setting that appliance up for production use. Companies that produce VMware Certified Virtual Appliances will also provide support for their appliances to ensure that the solution they offer has all of the latest security patches and is maintained according to VMware best practices. The companies that provide these virtual appliances will ensure that they have tested and optimized the entire solution stack on VMware Infrastructure.

The only problem with this is that some of the requirements are VMWare specific (not surprising) and can cause some minor problems for appliances designed to run on other virtualization systems like those we’re building at JumpBox. The issues are minor, mainly the requirement for SCSI disks and the VMWare tools, but if you want to build an appliance that also works under Parallels or Xen those are problems. At JumpBox our toolset will have to output a VMWare ESX specific image to fulfill the requirements. I’ll have more to report once we send an appliance through the certification process.