64bit Linux builds are supported as are Windows 2003,8. Windows makes a lot of sense for big enterprises who need to standardize internal VM images. It's a big step up over using a tuned VM template.
You no longer need to have a copy of the venerable VMware Server 1.0 to provision VMs. You can now use Workstation and ESX3/4/VC. Have a look:
You now have a choice of v4 and v7 virtual hardware with enforced CPU and memory limits to match. Using v7 compatibility costs you some older hosted compatibility (Server 1.x and Player) but will let your appliance users scale the VA to 8 vCPUs and 255GB RAM for heavier workloads:
Multiple virtual appliance images can be rolled up into one "vApp" bundle. This really helps with scalability especially since different components of a software platform have different bandwidth and headroom needs. Think of a scaled LAMP stack but with Apache/perl on one VM and MySQL on another. The MySQL VM can be hosted on a physical server tuned for fast IO and the Apache/Perl VM can be hosted on a much cheaper edge server. That would be a great candidate for a vApp style multi-VM appliance. One OVA, many VMs, one logical VA.
The build targets include OVF v1.0 in addition to the OVF v0.9 spec used by Server 1.0. OVA bundles are now supported as an additional build target. This is an archive of the OVF XML file along with the VMDKs but to my disappointment Studio 2.0 does not sign these to ensure their integrity for distribution. I hope they consider this in the next release.
There are better tools for helping bundle applications for inclusion in the appliances, for both the set of supported Linuxes and Windows too. I haven't dug into that much as my professional life is in already well bundled in .war and .rpm files these days. The dependency resolution is far improved, that should help new users.
Under the hood the PXE boot sequence used during VA provisioning has been replaced with a more reliable canned VMDK bootstrap process. This change is transparent to most users but can help keep Studio from getting confused by custom PXE implementations on the same LAN. A good change for sure.
Peruse the release notes for Studio 2.0 Beta here:
http://communities.vmware.com/viewwebdoc.jspa?documentID=DOC-10175
And download it. Give it a whirl. I love to see a relatively OS agnostic vendor like VMware reduce the basic OS to a rather small/trivial piece of an application. OS vendors should be freaking out right now and innovating like mad before they're as unseen and ubiquitous as the average C library...
