Oracle VM Virtual Appliances provide an innovative approach to deploying a fully configured software stack by offering pre-installed and pre-configured software images. Use of Oracle VM Virtual Appliances eliminates the installation and configuration costs, and reduces the ongoing maintenance costs helping organizations achieve faster time to market and lower cost of operations.
In an Oracle VM context, the term "template" is often used loosely and can refer to either a virtual appliance or a virtual machine template. The primary distinction between a virtual appliance and a virtual machine template is the file format. A virtual appliance contains a package created as a single .ova (Open Virtualization Format Archive) file or a set of .ovf (Open Virtualization Format) and virtual disk image files. A template is packaged as .tgz file which contains a virtual machine configuration (vm.cfg) files and one or more virtual disks.
You can use virtual appliances and templates to create multiple, pre-configured virtual machines. However, you can deploy virtual machine templates in .tgz format only in an Oracle VM environment. You can create, import, and export virtual appliances in .ovf or .ova format between an Oracle VM environment and another virtualization platform.
Oracle VM Virtual Appliances (or Oracle VM Templates) of many key Oracle products are available for download, including Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, Oracle Database, Fusion Middleware, and many more; see the complete list below.
When migrating enterprise applications to a private cloud you can rapidly deploy standardized and pre-configure software components in the form of software appliances. Once the standards and Oracle VM Virtual Appliances are created, you can customize and tune the virtual appliance after installation and save them as a golden image. You can then use these virtual appliances as your enterprise deployment standard, minimizing risks and variation across multiple-instance enterprise deployments. This and further concepts and details are now available on the following white papers: