Since I am an appliance guy I thought I will dwell on the topic that
took a long time
to mature and even now I am not sure if I am doing the right things.
An appliance is an OS. An OS image with everything built into it.
We find that LiveCDs are used to demonstrate something like a digital
audio workstation
or even networking.
That is an appliance but not really so.
A LiveCD is an optical image and it cannot save any information. So it
is usually used as a
conduit to install an appliance.
That is what I do to sell or distribute my products.
You need a bootable optical medium like LiveCD to install the
appliance to a hard disk.
Then the hard disk is booted and you have sold an appliance.
The OS is self contained with everything; the software packages, the
web server, the web panel
inside it, the backend that does all the real hard work and so on.
As you can see a LiveCD is a great way to distribute your physical
appliance worldwide.
However you have to ensure that the physical appliance on which the
LiveCD installs the binary
image is compatible with your release.
The other form of appliance is a VM or virutal machine.
When it comes to virtualization VMWare wins hands on and qemu wins in
the open source arena.
Linux people know qemu as KVM.
Anyway VirtualBox is another choice too.
These things run on all OSes for free.
So if you want to show your great UNIX OS appliance to a Windows user,
all they have to do is
run this thing inside a VMWare or a VirtualBox VM.
You can directly distribute VMWare images on your website and that is
a software appliance.
It is exactly like connecting a physical machine to your network if
the appliance is configured to
use bridged mode networking.
You can test a wide variety of networking products without wasting
hardware resources.
Just install a firewall VM or a VPN VM or a mail server VM on a
Windows VMware player.
And you can get going.
In fact a lot of companies do just that I think though I don't have data.
-Girish
--
Gayatri Hitech
http://gayatri-hitech.com