Technology is disclosed for generating a virtual appliance (“vApp”) for an application using an existing installation manifest of the application. The installation manifest can be part of a traditional installation package that is used to install the application on a computer system. The installation manifest contains configuration information for installing the application using the installation package. A vApp builder analyzes the installation manifest to identify and/or determine various configuration information of the application that may be required to generate the vApp. The configuration information can include information regarding the application components of the application, packages/dependencies on which the execution of the application components depend, an operating system on which the application components and/or their packages execute. The vApp builder generates the vApp using the information obtained from the installation manifest. The vApp can be executed as a virtual machine on a host computer system with a supporting hypervisor.