Virtual Appliances

A virtual appliance is complete ready-to-run services in [typically] a VMware wrapper.

Sales of virtual machines [VMs] now exceed those of traditional hardware appliances for many vendors.

An advantage of the virtual approach is that the virtualisation framework - the hypervisor - insulates the VM from the hardware.

When an organisation has multiple products, network administrators don't want to run and troubleshoot general-purpose servers, they want appliances.

In the future, virtual appliances [and virtualisation] will play a vital part in making IT systems more autonomic, enabling them to self-heal and do their own load balancing. Disaster recovery is becoming a key buying directive for virtualization.

Self administering data centres report via SOAP when the system is loaded and call for more resources - thus, the future of management systems is autonomic, and it's all about SOAP.

Other suppliers offering virtual appliances include:

• Covergence - with VMware-wrapped session border controllers for unified communications
• Kace - has a VM version of its systems management box

Also See

• VMware
• XenSource
• NetQoS
• Virtual Iron
• Microsoft
• Zeus
• Virtuozzo
  

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