Most of our customers are hosting providers, who typically run our software bare-metal or on some hypervisor. There are however a growing number of companies in the managed service (MSP) segment that like to offer services such as email security without having to do the actual hosting. Instead, they rely on cloud computing (VPS) providers such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Rackspace.

A few years ago, many cloud providers offered only “PV” virtualisation, where the guest OS had to be aware of the hypervisor (and thus, customised). They required custom boot loaders, partition formats, initialisation scripts, agents and PV kernels. Because of our “full image update” method (completely overwriting the system partition from an update partition, making updates are quick and reliable), having custom images wasn’t an option. Every Halon email gateway runs the exact same software image. Consequentially, running on such services isn’t possible.

Now that most providers, even Amazon EC2, offers full “HVM” virtualisation, we decided to create public images for a few of these providers in order to make it easier to launch our software on their platforms. We currently have public images available on

• Amazon EC2
• Microsoft Azure
• Google Compute Engine

and generic instructions for how to install (write the software image to the root disk) from a live CD/rescue mode on for example Rackspace.