virtual appliance hosting

[Stoddard]

What exactly is 'virtual appliance hosting?' Is this different in any way from regular virtual hosting?

[greenmatter]

A virtual appliance is a virtual machine image designed to run on a virtualization platform (e.g., VirtualBox, Xen, VMware Workstation, Parallels Workstation).
Virtual appliances are a subset of the broader class of software appliances. Installation of a software appliance on a virtual machine creates a virtual appliance. Like software appliances, virtual appliances are intended to eliminate the installation, configuration and maintenance costs associated with running complex stacks of software.
A virtual appliance is not a complete virtual machine platform, but rather a software image containing a software stack designed to run on a virtual machine platform which may be a Type 1 or Type 2 hypervisor. Like a physical computer, a hypervisor is merely a platform for running an operating system environment and does not provide application software itself.
Many virtual appliances provide a Web page user interface to permit their configuration. A virtual appliance is usually built to host a single application; it therefore represents a new sort of deploying network application.

Virtual appliance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia