Virtual Software Appliances

News	See Also	Recommended Links	Tutorials	Selected Papers
Xen on Suse 10	Virtual Appliances			Etc

A software appliance is a software application combined with just enough operating system (JeOS) for it to run optimally on industry standard hardware (typically a server) or in a virtual machine. Software appliances simplify server applications by minimizing the tasks typically associated with installation, configuration and maintenance.

The customer receives all service and maintenance from the application vendor, eliminating the requirement to manage multiple maintenance streams, licenses, and service contracts. The software appliance is typically sold as a subscription service (pay-as-you-go) and is an alternative approach to Software as a Service.

The software provider must engineer this solution with a JeOS and other capabilities to eliminate any requirement for on-site support since this could call into question the viability of the business model.

The management of upgrades is particularly important; recent advances by open source operating systems have been targeted at addressing these concerns, including a forthcoming 'Appliance Operating System' from RedHat and NexentaCore Platform 1.0, an open source solution released in February of 2008

Virtual Appliances are virtual machines instances that are stored in the form of images and can be deployed across various servers in no time. Most popular platform for virtual appliances is VMware.

Advantages:

Deploy quickly
Easy to install and operate
Require no special skills
Designed to run perpetually with no maintenance
Run on VMware, Xen, Virtual Iron, and Microsoft Virtual PC.

Old News ;-)

The JumpBox Virtual Machine & Virtual Appliance Library

Welcome to the Library. Here you'll find a wide range of powerful Open Source web applications packaged in the time saving JumpBox virtual appliance format. Many are available as FREE downloads and signing up for JumpBox Open will give you access to the rest.

JumpBoxes will run on many virtualization platforms including VMWare, Parallels, VirtualBox, Microsoft Hyper-V, Virtual Iron, Xen and Amazon EC2.

JumpBox for the Asterisk Telephony System

Asterisk is a toolkit for building telephony-based applications. It contains all the necessary components to build complex phone interfaces with features like IVR trees, speech recognition and synthesis, call recording and routing. With over two million users it's the world's most popular open source telephony project.

JumpBox for MoinMoin freshmeat.net

JumpBox for MoinMoin is a virtual appliance that makes it possible to get the MoinMoin wiki system running in under a minute. It has built-in backup functionality and can be moved across operating systems and virtualization systems.

JumpBox for Nagios 1.1.7

Nagios is a host, service, and network monitoring system that will watch your network and alert you to problems before your clients or end-users do. The system runs checks on hosts and services that you...

JumpBox for the MediaWiki Wiki System

MediaWiki is an extremely popular Wiki engine that allows people to collaboratively edit documentation. It’s best known as the software that powers Wikipedia, but can also be installed onto your own servers. The JumpBox for MediaWiki allows anyone to be up and running with this wiki system in minutes on any OS, and incorporates many system-level best practices for optimal performance and maintainability.

JumpBox for Joomla!

Joomla! is an award-winning content management system (CMS) that can help you build Web sites and other powerful online applications. The JumpBox for Joomla saves a great deal of time by capturing the experience of a skilled IT admin in a package that's very easy to use and provides a production quality Joomla! installation very quickly. This JumpBox is for the Joomla! 1.0.x series of releases. A JumpBox for Joomla 1.5.x is also available.

Trac/Subversion Development JumpBox

Trac is an advanced tool for managing software development projects. It provides a simple wiki, an issue tracking system, and tight integration with the Subversion revision control system. However, it's also notorious for being hard to install. With the JumpBox for Trac, it takes about a minute to get trac running. Plus, with the built-in subversion and database backup system and the JumpBox Web-based administration console, it gives you all the basic tools you need to put it into production without ever touching a command line.

JumpBox for Bugzilla

Bugzilla is a Web-based bug tracking system that enables software developers to keep track of outstanding bugs in their product. The JumpBox for Bugzilla makes it easy to get started without worrying about getting the right collection of CPAN modules, database scripts, or Web server configuration.

JumpBox for vTiger

vTiger is a Web-based customer relationship management (CRM) system that competes with applications like Goldmine, SugarCRM, and Salesforce.com. The JumpBox for vTiger is a virtual appliance that requires minimal technical knowledge to install. It has a built in Web administration console, and a backup system that supports archiving the state of the JumpBox to NFS, Windows file shares, and Amazon S3.

[Apr 17, 2008] Just enough operating system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

JeOS is the abbreviation (pronounced "juice") for the concept of Just Enough Operating System as it applies to a software appliance.
JeOS is not a generic, one-size-fits-all operating system. Rather, it refers to a customized operating system that precisely fits the needs of a particular application. The application's OS requirements can be determined manually, or with an analytical tool, such as rPath's rBuilder.

Therefore, JeOS includes only the pieces of an operating system (often Linux) required to support a particular application and any other third-party components contained in the appliance. This makes the appliance more efficient, smaller, more secure and higher performing than an application running under a full general purpose OS.

[Apr 17, 2008] Novell announces Suse appliance program for ISVs - LinuxWorld

See press-release Novell Announces SUSE Appliance Program and LimeJeos - openSUSE

The program will enable ISVs to create appliances combining their applications with Suse Linux Enterprise in an integrated package.

Novell also announced the beta release of Suse Linux Enterprise JeOS, a minimized version of the Suse Linux Enterprise platform that ISVs can use for creating appliances

... ... ...

Novell also announced Wednesday that it will officially participate in the LimeJeOS project, which is an existing community-led project building a minimized version of the openSuse Linux distribution. Novell will release several new components of the Suse Appliance Program, including an automated tool to build appliances, it added.