Virtually There: Steve Herrod's Blog

Mon, 27 Mar 2006

We have a rapidly growing research and development office right next to MIT in exciting Cambridge, Massachusetts. As with our Palo Alto, California offices, we find great benefits in being close to strong academic institutions and amidst a very active high-tech community.

Trying to be good, intellectually-stimulating neighbors, we've launched a technical seminar series. Our first seminar focused on "Virtualization Technologies & Information Security" and we were quite pleased with the content and participation. We've officially launched plans for the next seminar scheduled for June 29th, 2006. The topic is "Virtualization Technologies & Resource Management", an area VMware has always been focused on for several years now.

The full details and instructions for submitting your own ideas for presentation are available here. The deadline is May 15th, so check it out soon. Hope we see you there!

posted at: 17:47 | | | permanent link

Fri, 24 Mar 2006

Our Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge is now in full swing with hundreds of people interested in creating the most innovative, useful submission. The idea of these “virtual appliances” seems to really be gathering steam. This begs the question, “What exactly is a virtual appliance?” To help spread the word, I wanted to highlight the FAQ answer from our challenge page:

A virtual appliance is similar to a 'traditional' Computing Appliance and is designed with a specific function in mind. The major difference is that instead of being built on a physical computing device, a virtual appliance is built using virtual machine and can be run on VMware Player, VMware Workstation, VMware Server, or VMware ESX Server. A virtual appliance starts with a pre-installed and pre-configured operating system. In addition to the base operating system, a virtual appliance contains a pre-installed and pre-configured application. The application may have multiple components and services to provide the required functionality.

So in other words, a virtual appliance is a virtual machine with a fully pre-installed application and OS environment. Why is this exciting? Many reasons:

• Easier for customers to try out your appliance: Rather than shipping rack server hardware just for a trial period, just ship the virtual machine. With far less effort, the end-user can be up and evaluating your product in no time.
• Reduced "time to value": Beyond evaluation, virtual appliances can be similarly easier to deploy than many traditional computing appliances. The quicker someone can be up and using the appliance, the faster they’re realizing its value!
• Reduced test and support burden: If you ship a software-only appliance, you’re well aware of the QA configuration testing burden. Similarly, your support team likely finds that software installation and configuration generates a large number of customer calls. When the software is pre-installed and pre-configured, you reduce the testing matrix substantially and users should be up and running with far less room for error.
• Get out of the hardware business altogether: For appliances that ship with hardware, but don’t have particularly unique hardware needs, you can possibly avoid shipping hardware at all. The end customers can leverage their existing desktop or server hardware, saving money, rack space, power, and installation time. And the appliance vendor can avoid some of the joys of device drivers, revving hardware parts, product returns, and integration with monitoring solutions.
• Improved appliance availability: A virtual appliance running on VMware ESX Server automatically inherits numerous availability features including storage path failover, NIC teaming, and VMotion capabilities. Furthermore, if you’re running multiple appliances or combining them with your existing virtual machines, you can amortize the cost of more available hardware across more of your important applications.

I hope this helps you understand a bit more about virtual appliances and why they seem to be garnering so much attention!

posted at: 11:29 | | | permanent link