Novell, Inc.

Oracle International Corporation

Nathaniel Friedman

Miguel De Icaza

Peter Bowen

Cornelius Schumacher

Daniel Bornkessel

Garrett LeSage

A system and method for managing a virtual appliance lifecycle is provided. In particular, a hosted web service may provide a collaborative environment for and unified environment for developing, configuring, personalizing, building, testing, deploying, and otherwise managing a lifecycle for one or more virtual appliances, wherein the collaborative and unified environment may provide various features for-creating virtual appliances, monitoring upstream changes and modifications to the virtual appliances, and providing real-time analysis and feedback during various phases of the virtual appliance lifecycle, among other things.

System and method for managing a virtual appliance lifecycle

A system and method for efficiently building virtual appliances in a hosted environment is provided. In particular, a plurality of image archives may be stored in a build database, with each image archive including a file system having a directory structure and a plurality of files installed within the directory structure. In response to a build request containing an image description, a build engine may create a file system layout defining a directory structure for an image. The build engine may then copy the file system from one of the image archives to the file system layout of the image, wherein the copied file system may provide a subset of the file system for the image. The build engine may then build the image, which may include a file system having various files installed within various directories in accordance with the directory structure defined for the image.

System and method for efficiently building virtual appliances in a hosted environment

A system and method for supporting a virtual appliance is provided. In particular, a support engine may include an update server that can manage a workflow to update an appliance in response to detecting upstream updates to one or more software components that have been installed for the appliance. For example, the workflow may generally include managing a rebuild the appliance to install the upstream updates and further managing an integration test to verify that the rebuilt appliance behaves correctly with the upstream updates installed. In addition, the support engine may further include a support analysis manager that can analyze the software components that have been installed for the appliance in view of various heuristic rules to generate a support statement indicating whether support is available for the appliance.

Rebuilding a first and second image based on software components having earlier versions for one or more appliances and performing a first and second integration test for each respective image in a runtime environment

A system and method for inspecting a virtual appliance runtime environment is provided. In particular, runtime activity within a virtual machine may be monitored and tracked to manage a file system associated with the runtime activity. For example, a new image having a pointer to a base image being executed may be created, wherein the new image may be empty when created, and wherein data may be written to the new image in response to any files being created, deleted, modified, or otherwise accessed during execution of the base image within the virtual machine. Thus, a file system for the new image may be compared to a file system for the base image to analyze the runtime activity for the base image, wherein the new image may preserve runtime changes to the file system and provide visibility into particular runtime modifications to the file system.

System and method for inspecting a virtual appliance runtime environment

A system and method for efficiently building virtual appliances in a hosted environment is provided. In particular, a plurality of image archives may be stored in a build database, with each image archive including a file system having a directory structure and a plurality of files installed within the directory structure. In response to a build request containing an image description, a build engine may create a file system layout defining a directory structure for an image. The build engine may then copy the file system for one of the image archives to the file system layout for the image, wherein the copied file system may provide a subset of the file system for the image. The build engine may then build the image, which may include a file system having various files installed within various directories in accordance with the directory structure defined for the image.

Growing community of inventors

Munich, Germany

Nathaniel Friedman