Virtual Application Delivery Appliance - VADA Bing VADA Boom!

If the open virtual appliance format (I believe that's what OVAF stands for) ever gets implemented and used (not just spec'd), then the model above works. As an ISV, I don't know what Hypervisor someone is likely to have, and I sure don't want to have software for different operating systems (and linux distros) for native installation on physical machines, in addition to having the aforementioned running in various Virtual Machines. Talk about an "N x M" ("operating systems x VM architectures) scalability problem! My experience is that people will want to use their preferred OS/distro on top of their favorite hypervisor (N x M). Again, I'm just speaking as an ISV!

What's needed IMHO is a simple, inexpensive solution to do bare metal provisioning for Linux and Windows (and who cares what platform the tool itself runs on) that lets the ISV or the end-customer tweak a few parameters in the application stack (or in DomU parlance,  the DomU "role") that lets the end (IT customer) try it out on both physical and virtual machines, and deploy it into production onto either physical or virtual machines.

So, this is pretty close to what Brian is suggesting, except without the premise of everything being "only virtual"... Give me something that does both physical and virtual provisioning of OS + App stack/role (and I'm talking hundreds of dollars, not tens of thousands), and I'd be happy.  So would Brian's target customer (more time to learn the application and spend less time trying to get it to run!)

Thanks for the write-up, Brian, and the thoughts you provoked!

Thanks for the input.  This post originated from the Citrix Community Blog, and we'd love to see you add this input on the original post at: http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/adamma/2008/03/25/Virtual+Application+Delivery+Appliance+-+VADA+Bing+VADA+Boom%21.

 Hope you don't mind but I'm going to copy your reply to my blog at the above URL, being this is exactly the type of reply I was looking for to get an open discussion around this topic going.

 Thanks  again,

Adam

Well, I don't know of a single tool or solution to do both virtual and physical provisioning, but for physical how about MS BDD (now Microsoft Deployment)?  One of the key reasons of the product name change was to move away from the tool being considered for desktop deployments only.  However rudamentary, this is a provisioning tool.  Its not sophisticated but it is inexpensive.  Couple it with WDS and you have the ability to do media-less installations (with scripted application installation post imaging as well) via PXE.

Of course for more money (and WAY more flexibility and efficiency) there is Citrix Provisioning Server.  This can be done for both Physical and Virtual machines.  It's not really what you need in terms of shipping a completed installation off to a customer since they would also need to invest in the technology to "host" their image and stream it to their target platform, but if they were able to buy into it in this way, a VAR could have VDISKs created for all of their standard server platforms and simply load one up, switch to private mode, install the applications that the customer wants, switch back, and ship this VDISK along with the hardware to the customer.  The customer loads this VDISK into provisioning server and adds the MAC address of the new hardware and away they go.  The same concept applied to VDI where provisioning server works equally well.