One small problem today is the fact that a software appliance is monolithic, all the services are running in one container. Consequently in terms of scalability, high availability and even security, we require to manually configure multiple software appliances together to create a solution.

We are currently developing a similar set of tools to Novell to help users to assemble software appliances based on CentOS, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu & Open Solaris. We would also like to support OpenSuSe.

We are also developing a framework to help users to automate the configuration of software appliances (as a vApp) in a distributed manner. This allows users to benefit from the deliver of a software appliance as a turn-key solution that can be deployed over more than one instance.

Thanks again for helping educate the market.

Great blog post – I can’t agree more with the software appliance model, it makes our life as a software company so much easier.

We develop Atmail and support a hardware appliance running CentOS – When users evaluate our software and use a myriad of different Linux distributions, dependency hells, different PHP versions, modules, compiler deps, and so forth, this really takes away from the development teams efforts to focus on the final product. Juggling all the different variables to just install a complex software/server application, well, sucks.

I’m keen to see Suse Studio in action, just signed up for the beta, and would definitely consider using Suse for a software appliance model.

Keep up the great work

To address your concern, I guess you could say “vehicles” instead of cars, and imagine a car and a truck and a bus and a motorcycle and a moped and a bicycle and a jet ski being analogous to word processing and video games and email, or whatever. Even though there is a small minority of people who love tinkering with all of those things, most people just want to use them.

Thanks for writing!

16 GB of RAM is cheap, but it seems like we’re going down the road where every app is going to want to have its own gig or more VM, and I’d like to run more than 16 apps at once. Is the hypervisor the new OS?

–Jered

Totally agree on the direction of BIOSes.

I’m a big fan of VirtualBox. But I didn’t need to mention it explicitly because it runs VMware images so perfectly

Having worked for the virtualization industry for two years at Sun, I can tell you, there are big opportunities for services and applications being deployed as a VM fashion, either running on the so called cloud or on a personal device.

I don’t think we’re too far from the days where every OS instance in a machine will be virtualized by default and BIOSes become thin hypervisors.

You definitively nailed the spot with this at a perfect timing, and if done well, there’s a lot of business opportunities for Novell with this service.

By the way, can’t believe you mentioned Hyper-V and VMware and failed to mention VirtualBox !!! Shame on you!

SUSE Studio is of course targeted at software developers who want to create software appliances.

Thanks for your comment!

This model mostly applies to server applications. Firing up a whole VM to run one desktop app doesn’t make a lot of sense, in most cases (although there are some exceptions).

So some examples would be: mail server, wiki, CRM app, database, file sharing server, wordpress, point of sale server, etc etc etc.

Hope that helps,
Nat

The benefits include security (compromising one app doesn’t compromise the whole “machine”) and simplification (one app can’t interfere with another).

I think the simplification one is the big one. Reducing the amount of work a person has to do, and the number of things that the IT admin has to keep in mind, to maintain a workload, is a big win.

Whether these advantages are big enough to outweigh the virtual machine overhead varies on a case-by-case basis. Virtual appliances aren’t right for every app but they are right for many.

Applications that need a lot of RAM will definitely have trouble sharing a computer with other applications that also need a lot of RAM.

As far as I know all of the hypervisors pretty much require you to statically allocate RAM for the guests. I have heard (today at dinner in fact) that Xen allows you to increase or decrease RAM at run-time, but I’m not sure how this works or if it’s true.

In fact you probably want some operating system cooperation if you were to have dynamic RAM sizing in your virtual machines. For example, you’d want the operating system to use less buffer cache. By default Linux (and most OSes) will fill up free RAM with disk cache to improve IO performance. Perhaps we could let the hypervisors do some of this caching instead.

If the operating system needs to “play nice” with other OSes running on the same hardware, I guess that sort of thing would need to be taken into account.

In my experience putting 16GB of RAM in a server is pretty cheap these days, and there are a lot of server apps that run in a lot less than that, so you can definitely do “server consolidation.” I am also a big fan of Zimbra, but I haven’t run it recently. Sounds like it’s pretty hungry!

Best,
Nat

I can see running a web app on a vm then everyone accesses it through the browser, but if it is a desktop application or other – is everyone going to be running a of it on their desktops? I may be lacking vision here but I would like to hear more of how this will/is being used by people.

Still, in the arena of building one application for use on one processor, this could be really cool-especially in the embedded systems area.

I like the idea — I just went through this pain installing Zimbra (which, btw, is totally amazing). It doesn’t come with the OS, but almost everything but… it’s own apache, postfix, mysql, spamassassin, java, etc. Half of my install was figuring out what packages needed changes from the default Debian 5.0 install, downgrading Perl, and so on.

At Permabit, we go through the same sort of software appliance pain but deliver it on hardware. We have our own customized Debian release so that we can track versions, maintain source compliance, and so forth.

There’s one big problem, though, which my Zimbra experience shows well — resource duplication. Disk is cheap these days so I don’t mind having 5 copies of the OS instead of 1 (I use Xen), but when that gets up to dozens or hundreds it starts to become an inconvenience. VMs tend to require static partitioning of system RAM, even when they’re not using it all, and RAM isn’t so cheap yet. Worst, when I start running every application within its own VM, many of those VMs require precious, precious IPv4 addresses.

Does SuSE Studio have any answers for me here?

–Jered

P.S. Any change of getting a “subscribe to comments on this post” RSS link?