A New Way to Deploy Applications

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

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One of the most time consuming tasks for any IT manager today is installing and configuring applications. First the OS has to be installed, tuned, tightened, and secured. Then all the pre-requisites for the application have to be met, like installing all service packs, or maybe setting up a database, etc. Finally, the application is installed, and then you get on with configuring it for your organization's requirement. What if you didn't have to worry about any of this? What if you could straightaway get on with configuring the application? This is the promise being made by a new genre of software called virtual appliances. In these, the application and OS it runs on are bundled together. So you just have to drop the virtual appliance on a virtualization software from VMware, Microsoft, Xen, etc. and it's ready to go.

Anil Chopra, Associate Editor

While this concept sounds very powerful, and it could indeed significantly change the way applications are distributed and installed, you can't afford to be blinded by its benefits. As they all say, you must also read the fine print. For instance, currently there are no open standards available for virtual appliances. While VMware and Microsoft have released their virtual disk formats in public, they've not been submitted to a standards body to create a common spec. There isn't even a standards body available for it yet. Despite that, the movement is so powerful that lots of virtual appliances are available for download. Most of the virtual appliances today are based on an Open Source OS, so you save the cost of OS and its licensing. However, you do have to pay for the licenses of the virtualization software that the virtual appliances will run on.

Vendor support comes next. Would the virtual appliance vendor be able to provide you support for the OS and the application? If there's a critical patch out for the OS, then would the vendor provide it for you? Ideally, as the application and OS become one package, the software vendor must provide you with all the patches and updates. However, you need to be sure of this in the beginning itself.

Since most virtual appliances today are available on some variant of Linux, BSD, etc, you can save yourself from the hassles of installing Linux and Linux based applications. On the other hand, there's a huge chunk of Windows based applications users that get left out. Hopefully this will also get resolved now that Microsoft is working with ket ISVs to create appliances on its VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) format. It has also announced its own virtual appliances for Exchange and SQL Server.

Despite all the catches, it's a hot area. The ecosystem around virtual appliances is still building up, and will take some time before they're the rage.

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