[Fedora-livecd-list] Live CD vs virtual appliance

[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.html

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