A Virtual Appliance is a pre-installed and pre-configured software solution on one or more virtual machines optimized for a specific goal such as, for example, to publish a dynamic Web site, to manage data in a database, to send and receive e-mail, etc.

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A virtualization platform is a software capable of running and managing virtual machines, i.e. a set of data representing a computer hardware on which an operating system and software applications can run as on a physical computer.
An example of virtualization platform is VMware Server, the free and entry level edition of VMware products.

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A virtual machine is a group of files containing a virtual representation of a computer hardware (CPU, RAM, devices, disk, ecc.). It needs a virtualization platform in order to run and an operating system in order to execute software applications, as it happens with a physical machine.
A Virtual Appliance is a virtual machine on wich has been already installed an operating system and all the software needed to run a specific task.

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The setup of a complex software needs some tasks to be executed, as for example:

• the installation and configuration of system software or any other software required by an application
• the installation and configuration of the software itself
• the integration with the existing infrastructure and a general test

In a Virtual Appliance all these tasks has been already executed and then you will get a significant time saving. Also, you don't need a specific expertise to install and configure the software. Moreover, thanks to virtualization technologies, you have a concrete hardware independence.
Along with these benefits, you can setup disaster recovery and business continuity solutions in a real simple way.

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You can download some Virtual Appliances from this website by providing your e-mail address. You will receive an e-mail with a link for download the requested Virtual Appliance

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You do not install a Virtual Appliance. The following steps drive you to use it:

• Be sure to have the correct virtualization software installed
• Download the Virtual Appliance you want to use
• Decompress it using a software like 7-Zip or Winzip
• Load or import the Virtual Appliance in your virtualization platform
• Run the virtual machine and follow the first run's steps provided along with the Virtual Appliance

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Manthys Virtual Appliances run on VMware virtualization platforms. You need one of the following software:

• VMware Player
• VMware Server
• VMware Workstation
• VMware ESXi Server
• VMware ESX Server

VMware Player and VMware Server are free products from VMware.
You can also run our Virtual Appliances on other virtualization platforms supporting the standard Open Virtualization Format (OVF), such as VirtualBox, Xen and Parallels.

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A Virtual Appliance runs on a virtualization platform, such as VMWare Server.
The operating system running on the Virtual Appliance is independent of the operating system on which the virtualization platform runs.
In other words, a Virtual Appliance runs on any operating system supported by the virtualization platform.

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Manthys Virtual Appliance are available in the vmx format, that can run on VMWare Server and VMWare Player, and in the standard format OVF, that can be imported by many virtualization platforms such as Xen, VirtualBox

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Our Virtual Appliances ground on TurnKey Core platform developed by the TurnKey Linux project.
The Virtual Appliances you can download from this website are validated by Manthys by running tests and offering services.
Some Virtual Appliance you can find on our website are not available on the TurnKey Linux project website.

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