Virtualization Daily

Matt Topper has announced that he’s working on building virtual appliances to make it easy to get an Oracle system up and running. I’m not sure how the licensing works in this scenario, but Oracle is certainly something that could make good use of the virtual appliance concept.

Overall these licensing questions are going to be an interesting issue to watch going forward. The question is particularly important when you consider the platform that virtual appliances are based on. Commercial OSs are pretty much a non-starter in this space and linux is dominating. Of course most of the early appliances have been entirely based around open source software so it’s a little premature to conclude too much at this point. It will be interesting to see if there are some changes coming in license structures for commercial OSs to better enable their use in these scenarios. We’ve seen a fair bit of interest in the use of virtual appliances for deployment of windows based server software, but the licensing issues and the technical complexity of the windows platform are a huge barrier.