You may or may not be aware that Linux has carved a solid niche for itself in the cut and thrust world if IT. There are many, many web servers out there using a LAMP stack, and it is often used as a platform for building rock solid server appliances. And it is those appliances that I’m talking about today. The benefit of an appliance is that your IT team can quite often slip the server in a rack, plug it in, switch it on, and go and have a cup of tea. The alternative being installing software on software, and hoping the configuration that you have done down the line does not come back to bite you on the arse.
The clear benefits of this appliance based approach is that configuration time is cut down, and software overhead is cut to a minimum. It also has the benefit of potentially getting Linux in through the back door. All these advantages have not escaped the people at Suse, who have created Suse Studio to help make the creation of appliances easy. You choose the level of OS support that you want, this includes options for Gnome, KDE, text mode, and one called JeOS. JeOS stands for Just enough OS, and furnishes your appliance with just enough operating system to get you up and running. You can then select 32 or 64 bit, and a name. Once you have done that, you can choose the packages you would like to include, and Suse Studio will not only include it, but the dependencies as well.
The software will then allow you to create your appliance in a number of ways, either Virtual disk images for VMWare, or Xen, or an ISO for a live CD. It will also create raw disk images for putting directly onto physical media. I see this as a great way of deploying apps to offices cut off from the main HQ, where perhaps man power is not as abundant, or as expert. It could also be used to supply clients with quick and easy solutions to common network problems, as you could easily include firewalls, proxies, and all manner of software that could benefit form an appliance approach.
Images from opensuse.org.