Appliance is something of a buzz word in the virtualization space these days. It basically refers to some application (like a database or web server) bundled together with an (usually minimal) operating system. They’re designed for fast deployment, etc, etc, and they usually run as VMs.

The application distribution side of the appliance buzz doesn’t really interest me, but in my mind, for appliances to be useful, they have to be quick and easy to assemble and so forth.

What I’m really looking for is a generic VM autoinstaller, but “appliance builder” fits the lingo of the moment a little better.

Yeah, good catch. I went back and added the first point at the end, because I wanted to be explicit about that. I meant that it addressed the first three, not the first two.

Some script that generates the preseed from other configuration is certainly a big piece of what’s missing. I think ideally I want the appliance builder to also take responsibility for spinning up the VMs that actually run the install as well.

I’m not saying this is a particularly challenging problem, just that nobody’s solved it yet. “Small matter of writing code”, and so forth

Certainly it will perfectly address the third point as well.

So what’s left? The fourth point is that you don’t want to write 20 lines of preseed. That hardly seems like an insurmountable problem — you could e.g. make a script that generates the preseed from some other configuration file that you design.