What is a Virtual Appliance ?

By Matthew Leib, for VMwareSimplified.com 

Following is a post as a guest contributor to VMwareSimplified, where our goals will be to instruct on the basics of VMware.

Virtualization as a concept has enabled the IT community a number of fantastic options. Among those amazing options are the ability to deliver a limited level of downtime to the user community by the use of VMotion, brand new dynamics of backup, virtual desktops and virtualization began the first steps to “The Cloud.” I’m sure that even if you’re unaware of all the feature sets, and capacities of VMware, Citrix Xen, OpenStack, and other virtualization platforms, these abilities are apparent. Our community has embraced these, expanded on them, and the ecosystem of vendors offering solutions based on them is massive, growing and the attendance of last year’s VMworld surpassing 20,000 attendees in San Francisco only serve to validate the importance of these technologies.

Another quite powerful tool that has been added to the arsenal of assets for virtualization professionals is that of a Virtual Appliance. This posting will discuss the utility of Virtual Appliances, and some of the viability of these unique pieces of software, how they get implemented and some aspects of how they may be used within the virtual environment.

What is a Virtual Appliance? Essentially, a Virtual Appliance is a disc file that’s been purpose built to perform a specific task. Usually, these will involve the operating system, and the requisite components or applications to perform as a packaged entity. You will be able to download this as one file either packaged up as a ZIP, RAR, TAR, or the virtual appliance format OVA or OVF.

The purposes range from Linux distributions, test functionalities, free/demo/paid deployments of Virtual Storage Appliances, security servers and firewalls, web servers with many different functions, like your very own WordPress server, etc.

Once you download the file, import into your VMware environment. These should easily be functional in ESX(vSphere), Fusion or in Workstation. In many cases, they work as-is in Player as well.

In future posts, I’ll delve into some of the functions of distinct Virtual Appliances, and assist on the creation, deployment, and installation of these.