VMware Details Virtual Appliances, Desktops At VMworld

VMware executives spent much of their time at VMworld explaining the workings and benefits of virtual appliances and virtual desktop PCs.

VMware this week said it is launching a program to market and certify virtual appliances, and the company has made a collection of more than 300 virtual appliances available for downloading.

Srinivas Krishnamurti, director of developer products and market development at VMware, defined virtual appliances as preinstalled, preconfigured applications packed with an operating system inside a virtual machine.

Virtual appliances offer a faster time to deploy than software applications or hardware appliances, and they can be deployed on any hardware, Krishnamurti said. Management also is easier than with other applications or hardware because the operating system bundled as a part of a virtual appliance is a small part of the entire appliance and is easier to secure, he said.

For ISVs, virtual appliances allow an improved out-of-the-box experience because the application is fine-tuned for the bundled OS, Krishnamurti said. ISVs also face lower development and quality-assurance costs and bring their customers faster deployment cycles, he said.

While virtual appliances are complete application and OS bundles, they are still open to some level of customization by end-user customers for such functions as patch management, Krishnamurti said.

Still, Krishnamurti admitted there are a number of gray areas that have yet to be fully defined in terms of virtual appliances.

One of those involves the handling of licenses. This is not yet an issue, since most virtual appliances are Linux-based, but that may change, Krishnamurti said. "OS and application licensing will evolve over time," he said. "Nothing has been locked down yet."

There's also the question of who supports the application and the OS within a virtual appliance if they come from different vendors. "The whole concept of a virtual appliance is that the ISV is providing the whole stack," Krishnamurti said. "Patches are handled by the ISV. You have to trust the ISV to give you a stack that works in your environment."

In the end, Krishnamurti said, VMware expects demand from customers to drive ISVs to move quickly into bundling more virtual appliances.

"A lot of ISVs are starting to use them for evaluation," he said. "Then customers say, 'I like what I see, and I don't want to manage another box.' That will push [the ISVs] to come out with virtual appliances."

One VMware partner, Zeus Technology, Mountain View, Calif., used VMworld to introduce its first virtual appliance, the Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager Virtual Appliance. It's a virtual appliance version of the company's application traffic management software, and it runs on VMware's ESX Server 3 datacenter infrastructure. Trial versions are available for download, Zeus executives said.