virtual appliance

The ability to take a virtual appliance and run it on VMware, as you could on Xen or KVM, means more opportunities for the appliance.

If the OVF package is the single-file format, the extension of that file should be . ova (open virtual appliance or application).

The concept of a virtual appliance provides a new pardigm for the packaging and delivery of software.

But at the end of the day, the virtual appliance is nothing more than a large file that a hypervisor can use to create a VM instance.

If the hardware needs to be taken down for maintainence, the virtual appliance can be quickly migrated to another server.

After the composite virtual appliance images and metadata are created, the Tivoli Provisioning Manager environment must be prepared.

deployva: Deploys a virtual appliance into a new or existing virtual server as a workload.

The activation engine and customization plug-ins can be written and provided to configure the virtual appliance to the target system.

The OVF envelope is created and used in the package and distribute phases of the virtual appliance life cycle.

With Kiwi you can build a virtual appliance in a variety of different formats, including LiveCD, bootable USB image, or OVF.

However, if the virtual appliance provider allows extensions, they must provide techniques to maintain these extensions during update.

Although more manual than virtual appliance tools, this method provides the greatest control over building JeOS.

The capture task enables you to capture a virtual server or an existing mksysb image file to create a virtual appliance.

Using virtualization, the virtual appliance is portable across different physical servers (assuming the same hypervisor is present).

By contrast, in the virtual appliance paradigm, the operating system is part of the virtual appliance delivery.

The first part of this work, creating the metadata, requires knowledge of the composite virtual appliance.

Then you can select one virtual appliance and the target (CEC in Power environment) where the virtual server is created.

Using virtualization, the virtual appliance is running in isolation from other applications.

The term "virtual appliance" was coined by combining concepts from both appliances and virtualization.

A step in this direction is the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), which defines the format of virtual appliance metadata.

The OVF Toolkit helps to package and distribute the virtual appliance in conformance to the OVF standard.

The term was first coined by VMware and represents the ideal construct for the virtual appliance.

The multimodal coffee maker is a virtual appliance connected to an actual coffee maker.

With all these advantages, you may be wondering: Why isn't everything a virtual appliance?

lscustomization: Lists attributes that you can customize for a virtual appliance when you run the captureva, deployva, or importva commands.

After the virtual appliance packages are imported, you can deploy them within your data center.

The new virtual appliance will be displayed in a list of virtual appliances in the VMControl home page.

After the composite virtual appliance is selected, a panel listing each virtual image template is displayed (Figure 4).

The OVF environment is used in the deployment phase of the virtual appliance life cycle.

A virtual appliance is a minimalistic virtual machine image designed to run under a virtualization technology (for example, VMware or XEN).

The virtualized network infrastructure has also enabled other interesting innovations, such as the virtual appliance.

The advantage of the virtual appliance is that the focus is on the application.

captureva: Captures a virtual appliance from a virtual server or from an existing AIX mksysb image file.

This step is necessary in order to leverage Tivoli Provisioning Manager's DCM and workflow engine to deploy a virtual appliance.

Discussed OVF's role in the life cycle of the common virtual appliance.

Now, let's look at one of the key aspects of the virtual appliance.

For example, you can deploy a virtual appliance to a new virtual server on POWER.

OVF's place in the virtual appliance life cycle

The last two steps involve Tivoli Provisioning Manager and are common for any composite virtual appliance. The steps are (Figure 1)

Packaging as a single TAR file (open virtual appliance or . ova format)