[ Thanks to Jane Walker for this link.
]
“VMware, Red Hat and other vendors would have you think the
future of operating system distribution lies within a virtual
appliance, but reality isn’t as cut and dried as they’d have you
believe.“Typically, virtual appliances consist of a pre-configured
application stack and an operating system. Examples of applications
that have shipped as virtual appliances include collaboration,
email security, firewalls, intrusion detection and traffic
management…”