The IT world is increasingly turning towards appliances: pre-configured systems, which do exactly one job an do it well. Like a household appliance, all you need to do is plug it into your infrastructure, maybe change a setting or two and you are ready to go. While previously appliances always had a co-notation of a hardware box being delivered, the increasing popularity of virtualization enables to build pure software appliances.
One of the things we intend to investigate is create a logging appliance, using VMWare tools. We will set up a standard Linux, use MySQL and Apache with it and install rsyslog and phpLogCon. That in a “ready to use” fashion where only the devices need to be pointed to the right IP address of this virtual box.
This is one of my next projects and feedback on such an effort is very much appreciated.