Run virtual appliances on your desktop PC
April 22nd, 2006Virtualization is becoming more real and if you ever wanted to try Linux, but have been too afraid to install it or give up your Windows or Mac, the VMware Player will allow you to run most operating systems virtualized. The VMware Player is a free application that allows you to run virtual appliances. It is a perfect sandbox solution: test and install applications without messing up your desktop. VMWare Virtual Server and Microsoft Virtual PC allow you to create and run virtual desktops or servers on your desktop. The VMware Player is a light weight virtualization server without the overhead of a full fledged virtual server that has system management features.
A virtual appliance is a fully pre-installed and pre-configured application and operating system environment that runs on any standard x86 desktop or server in a self-contained, isolated environment known as a virtual machine. Virtual appliances provide an evolutionary step in the software distribution model.
There is a substantial list of free virtual appliances available on the VMware site, including operating systems like:
- Debian
- Fedora Core (4 & 5)
- FreeBSD
- Gentoo
- Kubuntu
- Puppy Linux
- RedHat Enterprise
- Ubuntu
and applications like:
- BEA WebLogic
- BugZilla
- MySQL Network
- Twiki
All you need to do is to download install the VMware Player (it’s a 28MB download). During installation it will ask if you want to disable autorun on your cdrom and also if you want to install the Google Deskbar, which you typically would want to disable by unchecking the checkboxes. To use the player you can either download pre-built virtual appliances or you can create your own. To use a pre-built appliance, simply download the one you want and open it with the VMware Player. You can also create your own virtual appliances, e.g. a virtual Windows XP desktop, by installing the VMware Virtual Server. It is currently in beta, but it is free for home use and it works just fine for creating virtual appliances. Note that you will need OS and application licenses (as usual) for the products that you install on the VM instance (e.g. Win XP).
So for me, as a new-cool-app-I-have-to-try-it type of person, this is awesome. It’s like having unlimited sandboxes at hand 
VMware
Microsoft Virtual PC (MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition is currently available for free)
April 30th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
Xen (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/) is an open source alternative. Being open source the community offers a lot of support for Linux applications like Apache and MySQL.
October 2nd, 2006 at 9:26 pm
[...] In a previous post on VMware virtual appliances I wrote about how easy and convenient they are. So it is good news and for good reason that the VMware directory of free virtual appliances has grown. The directory is up to date with recent versions of most (free) operating systems and many applications. They even have a “Voice Mail RSS Feed Generator” . Personally, I have been mostly using a WinXP virtual appliance - one that I had to create myself using the VMware server (also free, but because of the XP licensing it’s not really “free”). [...]
October 2nd, 2006 at 9:28 pm
[...] Of course you first need to have the VMware Player installed. (See previous post for more info) [...]
November 5th, 2006 at 2:07 am
This is a little old news but looks like MS wants the piece of Virtual Appliance share too
Here is the link to download their Visual Studio Orcas as technology preview in a Virtual Machine. And obviously you\’ll need MS Virtual PC to run this.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=82243606-d16d-445c-8949-9ee8c10cda2e&DisplayLang=en