VMWare’s list of Virtual Appliances appear to be endless. With over 1300 applicants available, VMWare’s list gives technical details and download information for these solutions. Virtual appliances allow often turnkey solutions for businesses.
So what is a virtual appliance? Virtual appliances are solutions (OSs, databases, storage, and other applications) that operate in the virtual infrastructure of an organization. In layman terms – a pre-built pre-configured software application for virtualization that includes the operating system.
So if you download VMWare, setup a server, download a set of files (Virtual Appliance), power on your virtual device, and the application is instantly available for use.
- Virtual appliances can be moved from one VM to another without impacting the user.
An example of this includes a SDK for Amazon‘s which is a web service that provides re-sizable compute capacity in the cloud. This application is used to interface with Amazon’s EC2 service.
Or Moodle the Online Learning Management System that major colleges and companies use for training is another great example of a turn-key solution. Moodle is easy to set up and use allowing you to create courses and technology that goes above and beyond the needs of colleges world-wide. This version is Ubuntu based and gets security updates automatically. Here’s a small list of universities that use Moodle.
- University of California, Irvine http://learn.uci.edu/cms/
- University of Georgia http://cantor.english.uga.edu/moodle/
- Texas A&M University https://maysportal.tamu.edu/
- MIT Teacher Education Program http://education.mit.edu/moodle/
- Ohio State University Math Department https://webwork.math.ohio-state.edu/moodle/
- Iowa State University http://tesl.engl.iastate.edu/courses/
- Orange Coast College (well-known in California, where I am) http://occmoodle.occ.cccd.edu/moodle/moodle/
and of course we do….
Bottom-line? Companies are buying large servers with tons of disk-space, memory and other resources and then loading VMWare or other virtualized server software onto these servers and loading appliances creating more servers for their organization that use less space, less energy, can be managed on one physical machine and have turn-key applications (Virtual Appliances).
How about a list of Linux based turn-key solutions? Network Area Storage, Domain Replacement, Joomla, Moodle, MySQL and more.
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