Trigence Virtual Application Appliances - point, click, you're done
Greg O'Connor, CEO of Trigence, and several of his colleagues, introduced me to the company's latest magic that the folks in the lab conjured up. It appears that they've been working to make industrial strength Virtual Application Appliances (preconfigured virtual images ready for immediate deployment) available to IT architects and solution partners. I've chatted with other folks from Trigence in the past (see Trigence - datacenter application virtualization) and was looking forward to learning about the industrial sorcery they cooked up in their lab.
What was demonstrated
I was shown a fantastic point, click and you're done demonstration in which a complete solution was constructed while I watched. It was a great demonstration.Here's the marketing speak they use to describe the process:
What if you could provision a complete Windows Server 2003 Application with zero deployment, zero installation, and zero configuration - in just the time it takes to start the Application?
Trigence AE transforms server side applications into Virtual Application Appliances. Unlike Virtual Appliances that package an application with an operating system - Virtual Application Appliances contain only the Application, and Zero OS. You can move a Virtual Application Appliance to any server at any time - whether the server is physical or virtual, running on VMWare or Hyper-V, located in datacenter or in the Cloud.
Want to learn more?
Try a pre-built Windows Server 2003 Virtual Application Appliance right now
Watch a 5 minute presentation about Virtual Application Appliances
Snapshot analysis
Getting solution development to a "once and done" state, that is do something once and be done with it, has been the goal of many application development methodologies over the years. Each new innovation took the state of the art one step closer to that goal.Virtual appliances have been on the radar screen of many solution providers, but they often didn't quite reach the goal. It was still necessary to do a great deal of work to configure the appliance to meet the needs of the organization. The virtual appliances consisted of very large files making it difficult to quickly deploy them from a central repository.
The approach being offered by Trigence is based on the learning they've gotten from developing and supporting their application virtualization products. They've learned how to create virtual images on the fly that are constructed of multiple, optimized images.
If you're interested, you might find the five minute demo a worthwhile use of your time.