Managing virtual appliances

Virtual appliance is bring-your-own license model, where independent software vendors (ISV) can offer OVA (ISV software plus operating system of your choice) for quick deployment of IBM® Power® Virtual Server workloads. It is an appliance-as-a service that allows seamless management and metering of IBM® Power® Virtual Server. Software support is handled directly by the ISVs for virtual appliances.

With virtual appliances, you can use additional services within IBM® Power® Virtual Server such as virtual tape libraries. For more information, see Managing Virtual tape library.

Onboarding your virtual server images for IBM® Power® Virtual Servers

Independent software vendors can sell software on the IBM Cloud platform by enrolling their account in the Partner Center and by completing the onboarding process from the IBM Cloud catalog. If you are an ISV and want to sell your software, see Selling on IBM Cloud.

As part of the onboarding process for selling IBM® Power® Virtual Server software, sellers must provide a public (shareable) virtual server image asset. To provide a public virtual server image for IBM® Power® Virtual Server, complete the following steps:

Create your IBM® Power® Virtual Server instance.
Create an instance of IBM Cloud Object Storage and upload your image to a bucket.
Create your HMAC credentials.
Open a support case so that the IBM® Power® Virtual Server product management team can convert your image into a stock image. Include your HMAC credentials and bucket details in the support case.