RPath’s Lamp Appliance

If you are looking for a really easy to setup LAMP appliance, then let me tell you about Rpath’s LAMP appliance for VMware.  I stumbled on this appliance a few days ago when a client needed a LAMP appliance to serve out an online application developed by a 3rd party company.  They needed a platform with the basics – Linux, Apache, MySql, and PHP components.  There are a wide variety of appliances out there for LAMP use and I have not by any means tried them all for this purpose.  However, the Rpath appliance provided everything I needed, was easy to setup, has a really nice web frontend to setup backups, configs, etc, and best of all is free.

Basically for setup, all you do is download the tar.gz file from Rpath and unzip the archive on your ESX box that you will be using to provision the server.  Once this is done, simply add the virtual machine to your inventory, power on, and you are in business.  The first thing you will be prompted to do is setup the network config.  This is a straightforward process.  One thing to make sure of is that you have a network assigned to your virtual adapter as this “no brainer” caused me a few minutes of frustration with the network setup.

One other thing that I like about the Rpath box is that the wiki links contain about everything you need to know about the appliance to get it configured and serving out applications.

Wiki Information

https://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/Appliance:LAMP_Appliance

Rpath LAMP download:

https://www.rpath.org/project/lamp/releases