Virtual Appliances as Debian Packages on Ubuntu

Ubuntu developers recently began discussing plans for deploying virtual appliances via Debian packages, a move which would open up exciting opportunities, especially in the server market. Here’s the scope, with some thoughts.

As Andreas Heck described recently on the Ubuntu developers’ mailing list, initial work has been completed on specifications for exporting virtual appliances from virtual machines as Debian packages. In addition, Heck has written a Web-based utility for managing the virtual appliances.

In most respects, none of this is very new. There are already applications, like Enomaly, that provide much of the same functionality for managing virtual appliances. And the ubuntu-vm-builder scripts make it easy enough to deploy customized virtual machines, while pre-configured virtual disk images for a variety of different hypervisors are already available for many popular applications.

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