Virtual appliances are great for isolation and usability, but what happens if something needs to change? Is it possible to address all angles with one approach?

Control (a.k.a. Project Management)
There are a number of fine build tools and IDEs, such as Make, Ant (Maven), and Trac. We've tested and incorporated many into our environment and these tools work perfectly when you know exactly what you want, and exactly how things are going to change in the future. But how many of us even know what we're going to have for dinner tonight?

Security
When taking responsibility for support of a Virtual Appliance deployment, security patches have to be implemented, but also need to be tested against the whole system. If you can conceptualize every single dependency in the operating system then, lucky you, change to one component doesn't scare you.

Pretty Pictures
What does it matter if it works, if nobody can tell what it does? Anybody out there who hasn't spent months in development only to have a few hours of polish get all the credit, raise their hand now. All of those who weren't secretly glad, put your hands down....

Flexibility
The goal is to make the development and production appliances work in harmony, giving us the flexibility (defined as the ability to add or change end-user packages) to produce any number of appliances.

There is no magic button, but Ubuntu is as close as we've seen. A trusted partner focusing on Operating Systems, highly tweaked base systems using Ubuntu's package management and multiple repositories, and out-of-the-box GUIs helped us roll out our demo of our IOI consolidator and extend the approach to our RabbitMQ appliance.