If you have been exposed to VMware, you know what I’m talking about when I start talking about how great it is.

In a nutshell, VMware will load on top of your Windows operating system and provides a ‘Virtual’ PC inside of your existing computer. It emulates everything to the point where an OS loaded in a Virtual Machine thinks it’s installed on any regular computer. One of the best things about it for I.T. Professionals is that it can be downloaded for free! There are two VMware products of interest that I will mention:

The first is the Server software which you can download here. This software will allow you to create the Image needed before an OS can be loaded on a Virtual Machine. During the image creation process, you will define how big you want the disk, memory, etc… Keep in mind when you create these images and define the resource parameters available, that is what will be taken away from your host Operating System for the Virtual machine. These resources are allocated dynamically, when needed, and only while the Virtual Machine is actually running.

Once you have created an image and loaded your Operating System of choice, you can get by with just the VMware player - which is the second product I alluded to. The player basically allows your VMware images to become portable. You can take a VMware image along with the small player program to any machine and boot the VM up for use.

I could go on about VMware, but that’s not really the point of this post. The nice thing all this has brought along with it is what VMware calls ‘Virtual Appliances‘. These are basically images that someone else has created (usually for specific purposes) and made them available to anyone who wants to download and use them. The Virtual Appliances can then be booted on any computer with the VMplayer installed. These images will typically have an Open Source operating system loaded with various software to serve a specific purpose. For example, you can download a fully installed version of a new Linux distribution. This would allow you to boot a Linux OS up just as if you had just went through the entire OS installation. With this work already done - it is much simpler to download and run something that has already been installed and ready to use.

Here are some examples of what is available, ready to use:

Virtual MYSQL Server
Virtual Appliances MySQL Server is a free to use nano-sized virtual machine hosting a MySQL server, and phpMyAdmin for easy web based administration.
The Virtual Appliances MySQL Server is just 22MB to download but provides almost 1.8GB of internal space for use by MySQL.

Network Security Toolkit (NST) Virtual Machine
The Network Security Toolkit (NST) is a system that provides easy access and management capability to best-of-breed Open Source Network Security Applications. The purpose for development of the toolkit was to provide the network security administrator with a comprehensive set of Open Source Network Security Tools for testing, assessing, analysis, monitoring and validation of security architectures.

rPath Port 25 Mail Server Appliance
The Port25 Appliance brings the best open source mail tools into one easily-deployable form factor. Whether your mail protocol of choice is SMTP(S), IMAP(S), or POP3(S), Port25 can deliver. In addition, Port25 includes mail filtering, anti-virus protection, and spam filtering capabilities.

OSCAR Cluster Headnode
This virtual appliance is based on the OSCAR (Open Source Cluster Application Resources) cluster infrastructure, a collaborative effort to make beowulf-type clusters easy to use and manage. The author is core OSCAR developer and uses VMware’s VMplayer on a regular basis for developing and testing OSCAR.

Again, keep in mind, these are ready to run platforms. This saves having to go through the sometimes complex installation and configuration of software, allowing you to get right to using them. The images can be used just in place of traditional server deployments!

Ok, this post has gotten long - I’ll follow up with the ‘nice network tool’ in a follow up post… (As you can probably guess, it is available for use as a Virtual Machine download!)