Live CD vs virtual appliance

[Patrice Guay]

This week, I attended the VMware conference in San Francisco (VMWorld 
2007). I attended several conferences and a lab related to virtual 
appliances (http://www.vmware.com/appliances/). These are virtual 
machines containing the OS and whatever software you may want to bundle 
on top of it.

Due to licensing issues, almost nobody uses Microsoft Windows as the 
base for their virtual appliance. Microsoft ties its license to the 
hardware. This means that a license for the Microsoft OS must be 
purchased for every physical machine where the virtual appliance may be 
used. The license can not be bundled with the virtual appliance.

VMware has developed tools to create Linux-based virtual appliances. 
They use a stripped down version of Ubuntu as the base OS. From what I 
saw, livecd-tools offers a simpler and more powerful approach to create 
an OS + application bundle. The virtual appliance creation involves 
several steps and configuration files. Using livecd-creator, only one 
configuration file is involved and only one command line is required to 
create the iso image.

The only advantage of virtual appliances is persistence. If this could 
be solved for livecd-tools, I foresee an increased interest from those 
planning to create virtual appliances for the livecd-tools project.

Regards,
--
Patrice Guay

[Douglas McClendon]

Patrice Guay wrote:
>  This week, I attended the VMware conference in San Francisco (VMWorld
>
>  2007). I attended several conferences and a lab related to virtual 
>  appliances (http://www.vmware.com/appliances/). These are virtual 
>  machines containing the OS and whatever software you may want to bundle 
>  on top of it.
>  
>  Due to licensing issues, almost nobody uses Microsoft Windows as the 
>  base for their virtual appliance. Microsoft ties its license to the 
>  hardware. This means that a license for the Microsoft OS must be 
>  purchased for every physical machine where the virtual appliance may be 
>  used. The license can not be bundled with the virtual appliance.
>  
>  VMware has developed tools to create Linux-based virtual appliances. 
>  They use a stripped down version of Ubuntu as the base OS. From what I 
>  saw, livecd-tools offers a simpler and more powerful approach to create 
>  an OS + application bundle. The virtual appliance creation involves 
>  several steps and configuration files. Using livecd-creator, only one 
>  configuration file is involved and only one command line is required to 
>  create the iso image.
>  
>  The only advantage of virtual appliances is persistence. If this could 
>  be solved for livecd-tools, I foresee an increased interest from those 
>  planning to create virtual appliances for the livecd-tools project. 

Setting asside the persistence patch I'm working on, how about an 
optional bootarg of rebootless_liveos_installer=go_for_it, which could 
be a default isolinux menu entry ala how run-from-ram used to be.  (or 
just _the_ default if you choose to spin it that way)

Where the arg merely automatically invokes a rebootless installer

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-September/msg01042...

Thus if you boot qemu(or vmware or whatever) with the "appliance master 
livecd" attached as cdrom, and a fresh virtual disk as hard drive, you 
get your newly provisioned persistent appliance.

$0.02...

(I'm sure some sort of cobbler+koan+revisor can probably do the same 
thing in a different way.  We're all headed in vaguely the same direction)

-dmc

[Jeremy Katz]

On Fri, 2007-09-14 at 17:29 -0400, Patrice Guay wrote:
>  VMware has developed tools to create Linux-based virtual appliances.
>
>  They use a stripped down version of Ubuntu as the base OS. From what I 
>  saw, livecd-tools offers a simpler and more powerful approach to create 
>  an OS + application bundle. The virtual appliance creation involves 
>  several steps and configuration files. Using livecd-creator, only one 
>  configuration file is involved and only one command line is required to 
>  create the iso image. 
There are patches floating around on the list from Mark McLoughlin to
add support for generating more than just ISO images.  I've mostly held
off on applying them because they raise some interesting (to me at
least) questions about code duplication and how to manage some of the
code sharing that really needs to happen between livecd-creator and
anaconda.  That said, I think that after Fedora 8, it's going to be time
to tackle those issues a bit more.  

>  The only advantage of virtual appliances is persistence. If this
> could 
>  be solved for livecd-tools, I foresee an increased interest from those 
>  planning to create virtual appliances for the livecd-tools project. 
Well, the way that you solve persistence for appliances is (I think)
just to to make it a non-issue.  ie, don't use an iso + squashfs,
instead maybe just have a qcow image with the ext3 filesystem on it.  

As above, the code isn't hard... just a question of what to do around a
few abstractions

Jeremy