I've noticed some welcome advances in the world of virtualization and appliances today. VMware open-sourced their guest tools which will make the lives of appliance vendors who are targeting VMware and multiple virtualization platforms much easier, especially when they're using tools like rPath's rBuilder. Excellent work, VMware, and kudos for a long-awaited open-source release.

Newly joining the fray, it looks like Ubuntu is entering the virtual appliance market with a tailored version of their distribution, tuned, liked rPath Linux, for appliance configurations. It will be interesting to see what kinds of tools they can produce to enable the creation and ongoing maintenance of their dpkg-based appliances.

One more interesting news item: it looks like a standard encapsulation format for virtual machines is finally gaining some traction: OVF. This will also be a welcome addition for virtual appliance vendors. You can expect to see support for this from rBuilder soon, I'm sure. Hopefully this will reduce the number of disparate (and very similar) formats that are currently in the wild.

It certainly looks like the appliance model is gaining a lot of traction in both the commercial marketplace and the open-source community. Exciting times!