I am testing different pre-made virtual appliances and my experience so far has not been great. I've tried VMware's vMA and that works fine, but I have not had the same luck with two other VAs; SyslogAppliance (http://www.syslogappliance.de/en/) and Vyatta VC5 Appliance (http://vyatta.com/downloads/index.php).
First I was surprised that both the SyslogAppliance and the Vyatta Appliance are delivered as regular virtual machines, i.e. not .OVF files. I was under the impression that a virtual appliance is supposed to be delivered as a .ovf package. Also, when powering on both of these appliances I have only encountered errors and not been able to use them. I have contacted the SyslogAppliances developers and have read a post on Vyatta's forums (http://www.vyatta.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2440) regarding the errors.
I think that the reason why VMware's vMA worked, but the other two appliances have failed is due to the way they have been delivered to the end-user. I have read that by using VMware Converter to convert them to an ESXi host they work. However, I have not tried this as I thought that the idea behind getting a VA is that they work as is.
My question is whether it is common to use pre-made virtual appliances (not VMware's, but others) or if you use the developer's ISO image to create your own from scratch? Maybe this is a stupid question, but after trying two appliances from two different developers I am considering just making virtual machines from scratch with the provided ISOs.
Thanks
