This session is for software architects and developers who want to quickly get up to speed on virtualization, and how virtual appliances can impact the software development process. We will start out with a overview of the main principle on virtualization (including technologies such as VMotion), and then see how these can be utilized in modern application design.

A virtual appliance is a software application that is delivered as one or more virtual machines, and therefore designed to be installed and run in a virtualized environment. Virtual appliances can, for example, be used to dramatically simplify the installation of complex distributed applications, and remove many common support questions and simplify the testing matrix.

However, the benefits are not only in software distribution, it also enables a new set of application architectures, that are otherwise typically avoided due to the complexity of installation. For example, shipping on an optimized Linux installation or providing a self-scaling distributed application.