Virtualization

To Build a Virtual Appliance

Why Should You Build a Virtual Appliance?

Save time and money from both a technical perspective and a business perspective when you build a virtual appliance. You’ll lower development and distribution costs, accelerate time to market, expand customer reach, and provide an easy-to-use, more secure software delivery system – all while leveraging industry-leading virtualization platforms. Your customers and channel partners can easily deploy, evaluate, and purchase your solution when it is packaged as a virtual appliance.

Benefit to Software Developers & Hardware Appliance Vendors

Reduce Development and Distribution Costs

Accelerate Time to Market and Expanding Customer Reach

Increase Security and Control

Virtual Appliance Authoring Tools

Below is a select list of virtual appliance authoring tools designed to simplify the creation of virtual appliances, extend the manageability of virtual appliances, and enhance the overall user experience.

VMware Studio

CohesiveFT

JumpBox

rPath

SUSE Studio

**We choose VMware studio as the authoring tool for now

VMware Studio

VMware Studio offers software developers and hardware appliance vendors an easy-to-use virtual appliance authoring tool to create, customize, manage, distribute, and deploy production-ready virtual appliances. VMware Studio leverages the industry's leading virtualization platform, VMware Infrastructure (VI), and offers built appliances all the management services that VI offers

To know more about VMware Studio:

1. Benefits
2. Features
3. System Requirements

**VMware Studio provides a Web Console with appliance templates

Steps to Build a Virtual appliance using Vmware Studio

1. Create a profile for the Virtual Appliance

2. Either your choose OS template or an existing appliance profile

3. Update Appliance Information, Visual customization like logo, label

4. Post Installation tasks like creating/importingdatabases and environment settings could be done with First Boot script. This is script is executed on first boot only.

5. Some maintenance tasks like cleaning up packages, source update automation could be done with Subsequent Boot Script. This script executed on all boots, except the first one.

6. Customize Hardware settings like CPU, memory and hard disk partitions based on the requirement.

7. You could customize the base OS with pre-install & post-install scripts. Specify the password for root user account and add more users if needed

8. Vmware studio has a repository for application packages. We can add custom developed debian packages to the repository which will be included while the appliance is being built. We could add Application Package URL referring to any external resources.

9. Choose application packages fromt the OS media like subversion, MySQL sever & client

10. Specify the Output format and Name for the appliance to be created. ZIP file contains .vmx and .vmdk files which could be deployed using Vmware server. Choose OVF format, to support other range of products like Vmware ESXi server

11. We can opt to enable Update Repository if the appliance needs patches/updates regularly. generated Appliance will access this repository to get updates. ISVs should publish OS and application patches to this repository

12. Need to provide Vmware server settings which will be used while generating the appliance.

13. Once information relevant to the appliance profile are provided, validate the profile to see check the Vmware server, Application packages URL availability

14. After successful validation, select Save and Build Appliance to save the profile and start generating the appliance. Vmware Studio provides verbose log while generating the appliance.

15. Vmware studio provides log history corresponding to various build for that appliance

16. On successful build, you could find links for the generated appliance in output formats chosen(OVF & ZIP). Download the appliance with the link provided and deploy it.


- Suresh Kumar J