“Red Hat announced yesterday that it intends to provide a
product for application vendors to use as a basis for virtual
appliances. The product will be the same as the general purpose
release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in order to maintain
‘certification.’ It will, however, have a new name–Red Hat
Appliance OS. According to Red Hat, the product will be a valuable
alternative to rPath because it preserves application
‘certification.’ Apparently this means that customers will still
need to assemble, configure, and maintain the components inside the
virtual appliance. After all, ‘certification’ is only valuable when
the components are not provided as an integrated, optimized, and
tested unit…”