In-house development teams and ISVs now have access to more public and private clouds with Novell’s SUSE Appliance Toolkit 1.1, which adds support for virtual and cloud deployment formats.
The toolkit, which features SUSE Studio for packaging an application into any virtual appliance form, now has additional support for virtual machine formats Kernel Virtual Machine and Open Virtualization Format (a platform-agnostic format), said Michael Applebaum, director of Linux and appliances at Novell.
“These new cloud deployment formats allow users to access a wider variety of public and private clouds,” he added.
Beyond that, users now have the ability to build appliances and application images for Amazon EC2 and directly deploy them to the Web service via the SUSE Appliance Toolkit.
New data center capabilities, such as support for network booting, enable ISVs to build appliances to be stored in a central repository and booted over the network for remote deployment, Applebaum said. The centrally stored and managed appliances can then be maintained and updated via the toolkit.
