Why Should You Build a Virtual Appliance?
Save time and money from both a technical perspective and a business perspective when you build a virtual appliance. You’ll reduce development costs, speed up time to market, simplify installations, and have fewer support calls. Your customers and channel partners can more easily deploy, evaluate, and purchase your solution when it is packaged as a virtual appliance. To learn more, watch this informative tutorial.
Shorten Development and Testing Cycles
Instead of porting you application to different operating systems and hardware platforms, develop for a single platform and deliver your solutions as pre-configured and pre-integrated virtual appliance. Besides simplifying your development, your QA teams won’t need to test for multiple operating systems and different platforms, eliminating the need for a complex testing matrix. These shortened development and test cycles free up resources for more critical development needs and increase productivity.
Simplify Patch Management
With virtual appliances, a single patch can be applied against the complete solution. You’ll no longer need to build or distribute patches for multiple configurations and platforms.
Focus on Your Software
Focus on developing and optimizing your software without worrying about building or relying on 3rd party tools for high availability, load balancing or backup capabilities. Virtual appliances deployed on VMware Infrastructure instantly leverage key capabilities such as VMware VMotion, VMware High Availability, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler, and VMware Consolidated Backup.
Remove Hardware Dependencies
Building a virtual appliance is simpler and more cost effective than building a hardware appliance. You’ll reduce dependency on 3rd party hardware and associated upgrade cycles, as well as experience cost savings on procurement, shipping, and evaluation programs. Because the application is pre-packaged with a slimmed down operating system, you’ll also reduce the amount of application/OS compatibility testing.
Industry Standard Packaging
Create a single portable package that is capable of running on any hypervisor with the Open Virtualization Format (OVF). OVF supports content verification and integrity checking based on industry-standard public key infrastructure. It also provides a basic scheme for licensing. With OVF, you can also create complex multi-tiered services with pre-configured installation.
Enjoy Fewer Support Calls
Since a virtual appliance is tightly integrated with all components of the solution stack, customers will experience fewer issues and the volume of support calls and emails is greatly reduced. Virtual appliances also help physical appliance vendors eliminate support conflicts where the hardware is supported by a 3rd party vendor. Solution providers will see significant savings in headcount and operations.
