27 January 2010, 09:38

Build and manage your own SUSE Linux appliances

Novell has extended its SUSE Appliance Program for producing software appliances. Previously, SUSE Studio was available to developers as a hosted service to produce appliances on Novell servers for use as virtual machines under a hypervisor or for installation on actual hardware. Novell has now made the SUSE Appliance Toolkit available which contains the software required for producing and managing software appliances locally.

The core component of the SUSE Appliance Toolkit is SUSE Studio Onsite, a locally installable version of SUSE Studio. The minimum requirements for its use are 8 GB RAM, 100 GB disk space and processors with virtualisation support (AMD-V or Intel VT).

SUSE Studio Onsite adds in WebYaST, a tool which can be used in a browser to both to build appliances and manage running appliances. The SUSE Lifecycle Management Server operates as a software update centre.

Independent software vendors (ISVs) will receive the SUSE Appliance Toolkit as part of the SUSE Appliance Program. Novell is also offering the toolkit for purchase to enterprises and IT departments PDF . .