IMNSHO having these Meta Appliances goes against the whole philosophy of having appliances in the first place. And, afterall, these Meta Appliances have been around for many years... They are called distros. The whole purpose of these appliances are that they are *role based* and easily set up in a federation with other *role based* appliances. You run a VM/appliance that serves up web pages/apps and you have a seperate appliance that handles mail. In a production environment you don't want the email server to become unavailable when you need to reboot the web server, and visa versa. You don't want to risk shutting down your PDC while you try out some configuration tweak on your wiki.
I think, when it comes to things like TurnKey appliances (and others of a similar ilk) that the old saying applies. "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."
Just Because You Can, Doesn't Mean You Should
IMNSHO having these Meta Appliances goes against the whole philosophy of having appliances in the first place. And, afterall, these Meta Appliances have been around for many years... They are called distros. The whole purpose of these appliances are that they are *role based* and easily set up in a federation with other *role based* appliances. You run a VM/appliance that serves up web pages/apps and you have a seperate appliance that handles mail. In a production environment you don't want the email server to become unavailable when you need to reboot the web server, and visa versa. You don't want to risk shutting down your PDC while you try out some configuration tweak on your wiki.
I think, when it comes to things like TurnKey appliances (and others of a similar ilk) that the old saying applies. "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."