For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

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	September 17, 2008 Virtual Appliances Are Coming New Standard Should Ease Application Deployments by James Staten with Galen Schreck, Ben Echols	Average: 5  (1 rating)

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Executive Summary

A new virtualization specification, the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), was ratified this month, and lays the foundation for a fundamental change in how enterprises deploy and manage software. It allows ISVs to deliver applications that can be installed with a single click, even applications that span multiple separate server installs and have complex configurations. This development has ramifications on how users recover applications, clone golden images, and ensure license compliance. OVF can be a sea change for IT but will require wide adoption by ISVs, toolkits aimed at enterprise administrators (not just ISVs), and a big push by customers. Several ISVs are promoting this appliance delivery methodology, including Oracle and SAP. Will you? And should you?

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Even In A Virtual Environment, Application Deployment Can Be A Royal Pain
• There Has To Be A Better Way: Enter Virtual Appliances
• OVF Solves The Worst Of These Problems
• Some Appliance Capabilities Still Need To Be Addressed
• Enterprise Benefits Abound From This New Development

RECOMMENDATIONS

• Push For Appliance Proliferation

WHAT IT MEANS

• Do You Still Need To Be In The OS Administration Business?
• Supplemental Material
• Related Research Documents

This is an excerpt