According to various embodiments, a method and apparatus for providing a virtual appliance are described. The method includes: obtaining metadata of a specific virtual appliance based on a received request for obtaining the specific virtual appliance, the metadata describing information about virtual machines involved in the specific virtual appliance, determining an association relationship between the specific virtual appliance and at least one other virtual appliance according to the metadata, and providing resource information for obtaining the specific virtual appliance according to the association relationship, the resource information including a plurality of resource addresses, at least one of the plurality of resource addresses pointing to a storage location of the at least one other virtual appliance. In this way, more resource options for obtaining a specific virtual appliance are provided, thereby improving the efficiency of obtaining the virtual appliance and reducing network transmission pressure on a cloud data center.