Using CA AppLogic® › Appliance Developer Guide › Appliance Kit › Appliance KIT Overview

Appliance KIT Overview

Appliance Kit is a package of tools and runtime for creating appliances from OS installations. The kit contains scripts and utilities for implementing the appliance boundary, as well as a set of tools to assist appliance developers in preparing appliances.

Description

The appliance kit includes:

• User Guide (this document):
  • Appliance boundary definition - what makes a VM an appliance
  • Appliance cookbook - how to build and customize appliances
  • Distribution installation instructions
    • Installation for RedHat and CentOS Linux Distributions
    • Installation for Ubuntu Linux Distributions
    • Installation for Windows
• Binary archive with one per supported target, including the install script. The binary archives are located in the release folder on the BFC server.

The APK installation supports:

• Creating appliances from physical server installs or from VMware/Xen images
• Upgrading old-style (volfix) CA AppLogic® appliances to APK
  • Please see the following topic for how to upgrade your old-style appliances to use APK: VolfixDHCPConversion
• Upgrading new-style (APK) appliances to a newer version of APK
• Provides support for both the Xen and VMware (ESX) hypervisors. For information about adding VMware support for a grid, see the BFC User Guide.

APK can be installed either on a boot volume image mounted into a subdirectory, or on a live appliance. The following software is installed by APK:

• All platforms:
  • Initialization script - sets up the network as necessary for the OS to operate as an appliance and starts the CA AppLogic®-specific services (VMA and CCA).
  • Virtual Machine Agent (VMA), including a command to send events to the controller
  • Counter Collection Agent (CCA). CCA is started only if the appliance has a configured mon terminal and the terminal is connected.
• For Linux, a pre-compiled para-virtualized kernel is also provided as a separate archive.