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

[Patrice Guay]

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.

Regards,
--
Patrice Guay