Assuming all said till now is a winning strategy I really believe the problem here is the starting focus.

I have the impressions many are trying to "simply" fit a whole Linux distro inside the virtual appliance with some nifty application on top.
I'm not sure this is enough to win $100,000 (and sincerely I hope not).

Coming from the IT security planet an appliance is an extreme tailored OS around a hardware set, doing nothing but the task advertised.
This approach leads to a very small, very fast, very simple-to-manage (well, apart Cisco stuffs) boxes companies not having money to invest in know-how are happy to buy.

I think this approach should be applied in a virtual appliance too, considering average RAM available in an average desktop computer and average media vectors (IMHO thinking the Virtual Appliance will move around by CDRom is not a positive starting point).

So, at the end of the day, I'm wondering how space could take a Linux kernel without anything but 1 or 2 packages (let's say even 10 of them) to provide the feature you're looking for. More than 192MB?
(just consider Damn Small Linux is desktop distribution working in 50mb space).

BTW: you may find interesting VMware Challenge suggestions:
http://www.virtualization.info/2006/03/vmware-challenge-suggestions.html

HTH

Alessandro Perilli, CISSP, MVP
http://www.alessandroperilli.com

Blogging about IT Security on http://www.securityzero.com
Blogging about Virtualization on http://www.virtualization.info

oops - double post

This goes against the norm, smaller the better. When you surf through the entries are you going to down load a 2 gig double zipped monster or a 20-30 meg VM. The smaller, cleaner and more dedicated to its task the VM is, will result in more down loads even if it is just to see what it does.

A VM based on the Linux Disk Router Project, could be very small maybe 3-5 megs.

Ok. so its a 2GB limit. Does that include everything the appliance needs? What if the appliance needs a passthrough lun or a vmdk mounted for storing data?

is that to be included in the 2GB as well?

thanks

thanks for that clarification.

as long as it runs on Player, it qualifies right?

but what about in an enterprise level environment where more data could be stored or perhaps the retention period for data is longer and so it occupies more space?

in that case, 2GB won't be nearly enough i think.

Thought I would post that my VM w/tools is 202 megs, without tools installed 87 megs. I will submit both versions, maybe?