Components of a Virtual Appliance

InstallAnywhere 2021

The following diagram presents the components of a typical virtual appliance (a single-VM-based virtual appliance).

Components of a Virtual Appliance

The virtual appliance includes a thin operating system layer called just enough operating system (JeOS). It also includes the required operating system packages and the final application. The self-contained virtual appliance can run directly on hypervisors such as VMware vSphere or Amazon EC2.

InstallAnywhere also includes support for a virtual appliance that has multiple virtual machines; a multi-tier virtual appliance can be deployed to VMware vCenter servers.