VMware Virtual Appliances Community
trevlix
Contributor
Contributor

Size of virtual appliance?

I've been looking at the community virtual appliances and the uncompressed sizes range from 8 MB to over 700 MB.

What is everyone's opinions on a good size for one? Obviously, the smaller the better and the size will all depend on what is inside, but at what point does it become too big?

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Alessandro_Peri
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi Tyler,

I personally believe that you should use as metric the actual stardard size for USB keys.

I think that the most sold today is the 256MB. So, I woudn't create a Virtual Appliance occupying more that this size (including VMware Player and documentation).

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

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trevlix
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks. That brings up an interesting question of usable disk space for your appliance.

Assuming that you want your total image to be 256 MB, you allow the appliance to have 64 MB of memory and you are using a Linux/BSD OS. You still need to have around 64 MB of swap space, which leaves you with around 192 MB of usable disk space (actually less than that bc of file system internal stuff). You lose even more if you give it 128 MB of memory.

Granted, you could always go with less swap to increase the amount of usable disk space and I think if you build your appliance correctly it should never hit any swap, but I don't think you can build any modern OS without swap (I've never tried).

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continuum
Immortal
Immortal

Trevlix - don't read Allesandros suggestion to strictly.

I doubt you will have good results when you start with:

"I got 25MB to fill - what can I do that fits ...?"

I'd suggest that you think about a task and a convincing solution first - if your VM can find someones "Love of your life" in 5 seconds and this function depends on a large image-collection of little green frogs - 300MB for a image-database is more than justified.

It doesn't make sense to pay the 256MB size with a 50% divorce-rate 5 years later Smiley Wink

Ulli


________________________________________________
Do you need support with a VMFS recovery problem ? - send a message via skype "sanbarrow"
I do not support Workstation 16 at this time ...

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Alessandro_Peri
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

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

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trevlix
Contributor
Contributor

Don't worry, I'm not reading the suggestion too strictly. I was looking for suggestions and he was actually thinking along the same lines as me.

My worry is that the size of an appliance may be an offset for the audiance my appliance is being built for (consumers). I want to have the right functionality but don't want it to be too big to deter downloads and installations. Right now, I'm shooting for 256-500 MB total size uncompressed which I think is a good trade-off and \_should_ give me all of the space for the functionality I require.

Anyone want to post what they are shooting for size-wise? Just curious here.

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continuum
Immortal
Immortal

oops - double post


________________________________________________
Do you need support with a VMFS recovery problem ? - send a message via skype "sanbarrow"
I do not support Workstation 16 at this time ...

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trevlix
Contributor
Contributor

Allesandro - You make very good points and I agree with it all. I sincerely hope that the winning appliance is not a full Linux install. To me, that kinda defeats the purpose of the contest.

As I am designing mine, one of my tasks is to get my chosen distro down to as small as possible. I think there are a number of things you can do in order to do this, including recompiling the kernel, removing un-necessary packages and files, etc. I'm really very excited to see what comes out of the contest in this area especially since I've been spending alot of time on this.

I also want to say that I don't agree with your thumb drive idea. That never occured to me and really opens up some new possibilities for virtual appliances.

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Dallas
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

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.

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RDPetruska
Leadership
Leadership

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

Actually, there's one out there with FreeSco, configured, @ 1.41 MB. Check out vmguru.com Smiley Happy

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anoop
Contributor
Contributor

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

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bac
Expert
Expert

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?

Bear in mind that the whole idea of the appliance is that it should be pre-configured; the idea is that you should be able to download the thing and it should do whatever it does without any additional configuration on the part of the end user. Consider in particular that the Appliance should be able to be run in VMware Player, which has no UI for making configuration changes. So your entry should probably not include any instructions like "Download this appliance, then add a new .vmdk file, then...".

Anyway I think the rule is that the file limit applies to the compressed size of your entry, period. I.e. whatever it is you upload to our server to be judged (and therefore, whatever a potential user would download to use) has to fit in the size limit. If your VM had a growable .vmdk that started out empty but grew once it was used, I think that would be ok as long as the VM started out under the limit.

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anoop
Contributor
Contributor

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.

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RDPetruska
Leadership
Leadership

OK... Not sure how much clearer this can be...

Your Zip file which you submit must be no larger than 2 GB. If it extracts out and is 100 Gb in size it is still legitimate! (not that I believe anything could be compressed quite that much, but I'm trying to make a point here).

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Dallas
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

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

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tysonkey
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Including Tools is a good idea, but it's not mandatory.

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bac
Expert
Expert

That's an awfully big difference, much larger than the amount of useful stuff we install as part of the Tools. Are you sure you don't still have the Tools tar file and/or the vmware-tools-distrib directory wherever you unpacked the tar? The install file is a lot bigger than the stuff you need, because we include kernel modules for a whole bunch of supported guests. Only one set of modules is actually needed for a given guest OS though.

The binaries and modules that you actually need shouldn't be more than a handful of megabytes in size, so you can probably figure out what else is being added that you don't actually need and remove it.

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trevlix
Contributor
Contributor

I found that in my install the VMWare tools were the biggest thing because I had to install with the tar file. However, I trimmed it down to only a couple of MBs by getting rid of a bunch of modules that I would never use.

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samwyse
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I like to use a seperate vmdk for all of my volatile data (/tmp, /var, etc.) This not only means that I can easily purge everything after tools installation and/or testing, it allows the possibility of the end-user replacing the drive with a larger version if they have more data (say, in a database) than I expected.

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Dallas
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Sorry for the slow reply, I did not realise anyone had responded to me.

I have cleaned out all the tar files in the distro. Also all the temp files. The compression is winzip and these amounts are from the Windows Platform, on my Fedora 4, the tar file is a little smaller at 82 megs and then about the same at 202 with the tools.

Thanks

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