embodiments of the present invention address deficiencies of the art in respect to configuring a computing appliance and provide a method , system and computer program product for device certificate based virtual appliance configuration . in one embodiment of the invention , a virtual appliance secure configuration method can be provided . the method can include mounting non - volatile storage to the virtual appliance , retrieving a device certificate from the mounted storage and extracting a signature from the device certificate , activating the virtual appliance in a network domain and acquiring an adapter address and unique identifier for the virtual appliance , and authenticating the signature with the adapter address and unique identifier to ensure a unique active instance of the virtual appliance .