Recently, an idea of virtual appliance has been gaining popularity among the IT crowd. VMWare pioneered the idea and threw a $200,000 contest, generating a lot of buzz. The idea is very attractive – an application or a set of applications is packaged as a virtual machine image and can be quickly deployed on any computer.

For example, if you need a DNS server, LAMP application server or a browser with pre-configured settings, what you need to do is 1) create an empty VM; 2) install the OS and required applications into a VM; 3) clone the VM when you need another instance of this virtual appliance. No installation or configuration is required – it just works.

Exciting and innovative? Perhaps, but to me it’s so 90s. Here is why…