Difference between 'virtual appliance' and 'vApp'

[lbalders]

What is the difference between 'virtual appliance' and 'vApp'? Reading VMWare

documents and extensive googling have not resulted in a clear answer.

According to the 'Developer’s Guide to Building vApps and Virtual Appliances',

both can contain one or more VMs. But it seems that vApps can only be run

in a hypervisor environment, and not a hosted environment.

Thank you.

[mcowger]

A virtual appliance is a generic term for an application delivered as a prebuilt unit.

vApp is a VMware specific term for an application encapsulated within a vApp pool (which works on both hosted and hypervisors).  The vApp can define a number of specific things about the appliance, such as performance/resource pools, IP address allocation policies, firewall requirements, etc.

[hemantha2011101]

hi,

I'm a newbie to vApps and I have a similar doubt.

1. I have a windows VM installed/running and I converted it to OVA format. Can I call this OVA file a vApp ? (Or simply a virtual appliance?)

    On which vmware products/platforms can I play this OVA file ? (among ESX/ESXi, Workstation, Player etc.)

2. Now, using VMware Studio, I built a vApp by importing an already existing VM (in OVA format). Now, I have a vApp containing a single VM.

    On which products/platforms can I play this vApp ?(among ESX/ESXi, Workstation, Player etc.)

thanks in advance.

--Hemanth

[Tsjo]

Hi,

1. It's a virtual appliance and it can be used in ESX(i), Workstation and Player.

2. vApps can only be used in a vSphere enviroment with DRS enabled.

The information is available in the administration docs.