Virtual Appliances for testing, evaluation and development.

One of the many benefits of virtual servers is the ability to quickly and easily create new servers to host new applications. Rather than needing physical hardware to test a new piece of software a virtual machine can be rolled out in minutes and your business can start evaluating within the hour than within the week or month.

To illustrate the point, we shall in this blog post, describe the process of implementing a OpenBravo server using Sun’s VirtualBox hyper-visor virtualisation software. Installing a server and the software is normally a two stage operation, however as virtualisation standardises the hardware platform (it is all the same once virtualised), it means that operating system installation is simplified as there is no need to cater for a wide variety of hardware choices.

The upshot of this is that people and businesses have started creating “Virtual Appliances”, where they package the operating system and the software into a virtual machine. So you do not even need to worry about installing the operating software or the software for that matter. The software provider does this all for you and you receive an “appliance” that simply needs turning on and configuring for your environment and business.

So in this example we are going to install the popular OpenBravo software from http://www.openbravo.com/. Normally with this we would need to carefully check that we have the operating system that the software requires along service packs, databases etc. In our case however we are going to use their Virtual Appliance and save time and decrease the risk of something going wrong and delaying our installation.

We simply downloaded the .ZIP’d virtual appliance, a mere 350mb, and decompressed it onto the disks where our other virtual servers exist. Then we follow the simple instructions on the website for installation ( http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/Virtual_appliances ):

* Decompress OpenbravoERP-2.40-x86.virtualbox.gz, this will result in the OpenbravoERP-2.40-x86.virtualbox.vdi file.
* Open VirtualBox and click on Machine -> New. Enter Openbravo ERP Community in the Name and select Linux 2.6 in OS Type. Click on Next.
* Select 512MB of Base Memory Size. Click on Next. In case you are using the 2.50alpha-r1 appliance, select 1024MB.
* Click on Existing to add the image. Then Add, and browse to select the OpenbravoERP-2.40-x86.virtualbox.vdi file. Click on Select, then on Next and finally in Finish.

We then start up the virtual server and wait, it turns out the longest part of rolling out this OpenBravo server is waiting for the Database to initialise and Tomcat to deploy and start. The only issue we caught was that we forgot the networking issue with the Virtualbox virtual network card being set to the NAT mode, which prevented us connecting via the HTTP web interface to the OpenBravo virtual appliance. But a quick power down and configuration change solved that problem and we were able to connect ok.

From here we had a fully functional OpenBravo server up and running and ready to evaluate. If we decided we liked the software, we could easily move the virtual machine from a test/development server to a hosting server for production virtual machines. In the past we have seen this happen often. A test suddenly becomes a useful business server and the virtual machine that was a test becomes production. Of course being a virtual machine this is not a problem as it is simple to move it to a different physical host server to meet the processing requirements or simply because that is where production servers reside.

You can see from this simple example that you can have a test/evaluation server up and running in less than an hour, your team could evaluate in a day or two. If this had been a physical environment it could easily take that long to simple source the hardware and get the operating system installed. If time is important to your organisation, then virtual servers and virtual appliances can provide a great time saving.

We are finding increasingly that businesses first forays into virtualisation are starting with virtual appliances, then progress to building their own virtual servers and virtual desktop machines.

enVirtua’s role in this is clear, we aim to assist organisations experiment with virtualisation. We are there to assist you build the base layer of a hypervisor. We can then help you get your first virtual servers and appliances running. Progressing from this stage to a larger deployment of virtualisation can be made easier by allowing enVirtua to help you plan and rollout host servers and management tools, such as automation of your virtual infrastructure.

Contact us via email ( sales@envirtua.com ) or phone ( 020 7193 8987 ) for an informal discussion about using virtual appliances.