The Console

Posted by Srinivas Krishnamurti
Director of Product Management and Market Development

Greetings from VMworld 2007! Before the week gets really crazy, I wanted to jot down a couple of thoughts to document the exciting progress around Virtual Appliances since my blog on Enterprise Software 2.0 at VMworld 2006.

ISV Momentum

When we first started talking about virtual appliances in June 2005, we had six appliances from leading ISVs and OSVs listed on our web site. Since then virtual appliances are fast becoming a better way to distribute software for both evaluations and production use. ISVs are shipping virtual appliances because it reduces their development, testing and support costs and reducing time to market. Customers are more receptive to receiving software as virtual appliances because it is easier for them to deploy and manage. The combination is leading to more ISVs creating virtual appliances. We now have ~600 virtual appliances available in the Virtual Appliance Marketplace (VAM). Many of our larger ISV partners are jumping on the band wagon – BEA, Business Objects, IBM and McAfee all have their virtual appliances available in the VAM. Another compelling virtual appliance that was recently added is Lefthand Networks Virtual SAN Appliance. It converts local storage into a clustered iSCSI SAN. Now that is a cool concept… And the great thing is that there are more virtual appliances in the pipeline so be sure to check the VAM often for new virtual appliances.

Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF)

Think about all the CDs you own and how many different artists they represent and then imagine if every one of those artists said that his/her music can only be played on the CD player they sell. If you listen to more than one artist, you will end up with multiple CD players at home forcing you to constantly switch between them depending on what music you want to listen to. Sounds painful, doesn’t it? Oh, wait, it doesn’t end there. What if you want to listen to your music on the long commute in to work or on a long trip? How many CD players does your car need to support? Oye vaaye! Thankful we don’t live in that painful world because of standards! You can now buy and play any CD (software app packaged as a virtual appliance) on any CD player you own at home (data center) or in your car (remote office). Think of OVF as a similar format for virtual appliances. We worked with Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft and XenSource to come up with a standard way to package and distribute virtual appliances so that our customers can run them on any virtualization platform. As a customer you have the freedom of choice to buy a virtualization platform based on price and functionality and not be locked with one vendor because the content you need is only available in one non-standard format. There is a tremendous amount of useful information here.

JeOS Update

I recently talked about Just Enough Operating System (JeOS – pronounced “juice”) and how it will simplify IT management headaches, reduce patch frequency and improve security. I’m very excited to note that Ubuntu will soon ship Ubuntu JeOS, a slimed down Ubuntu Server OS that is optimized for VMware virtual appliances. Besides their JeOS being small and optimized for VMware, Ubuntu’s kinder and gentler distribution terms will be very appealing to ISVs who want to distribute Virtual Appliances. I applaud the folks at Canonical for taking the lead on providing an OS optimized for virtual appliances. It will be interesting to see how the other OSVs respond to this news.

VMware Tools

Lastly, I wanted to plug the effort around open sourcing VMware Tools. This is relevant to virtual appliances because it allows ISVs to provide Tools for the JeOS they include with their application. It gives ISVs the freedom of choice to pick any JeOS they want and still be able to ship a virtual appliance that is optimized to run efficiently on VMware Infrastructure.

Hope to see some of you at VMworld 2007.