VMTN Blog

Srinivas Krishnamurti gives us the Virtual Appliances – 2007 Year in Review. Here are his highlights, but click through and check out his perspective on the beginnings and the future challenges and directions in the virtual appliance space.

1. Virtual appliances outside the security space became a reality with many tier 1 ISVs building virtual appliances. BEA launched their LiquidVM initiative. Business Objects, IBM, McAfee and others have all joined in with virtual appliance editions of their software stacks.

2. Customers were starting to buy production-ready virtual appliances. I’ve met numerous customers who bought virtual appliances and swear by the simplicity and ease of management they offer. Our marketing team will be posting quite a few success stories shortly.

3. Several leading analysts initiated coverage on virtual appliances. Gartner, IDC, Forrester, Yankee Group and others are actively tracking virtual appliances.

4. JeOS (Just Enough OS, pronounced “juice”) started to get traction within the OS community. Ubuntu JeOS is already available – kudos to the Canonical team for being the first OS vendor to take on Virtual Appliances. RedHat announced their intention to offer their version. Even though Microsoft hasn’t really participated in the virtual appliance space, their latest OS offers users the ability as part of Server Cores to install only those components that are required for each server installation and if they can get their licensing and pricing right, they could be a huge player in this space as well. I’m sure Novell and other OS vendors will eventually get on the bandwagon as well.

5. Leading vendors including Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and XenSource collaborated on Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF), which was submitted to DMTF as a standard for packaging and distributing virtual appliances.

6. The ecosystem around virtual appliances started growing with many startups either getting in or getting traction. rPath, virtualappliances.net, JumpBox, cohesiveFT stick out in this category.

7. Several vendors mimicked VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace with their own. Parallels introduced their VA Directory. RedHat rolled out RHX.

8. Microsoft joined the party with the VHD Test Drive program (launched in November 2006) to allow ISVs to redistribute Windows in a virtual machine for 30-day evaluations.

Srinivas conceptualized and evangelized this concept from the beginning, and shepherded the VAM through its wild growth. I helped build the original site and it's been fun watching both the traffic grow as well as the concept spread through the industry. Throughout last year and this, I've seen many blog posts where people are just getting the concept -- maybe obvious to some, but to others (like me) it was a full-fledged lightbulb going off over my head. And now when you do a search you see ISVs and open source projects touting their latest virtual appliance releases. All this from a small seed in 2005 -- pretty compelling!