Imitation really is the highest form of flattery. Virtual Iron has recently released their own Virtual Appliance program which they call the “Virtual Appliance Exchange”. This of course is a direct copy of VMware’s Virtual Appliance program, and a direct result of all of the push that VMware has been putting behind the Virtual Appliance concept.

Remember the Virtual Iron blog post titled “First VMware ignores you, then VMware laughs at you, then VMware fights you, then you win”? Maybe that should have been titled “First you copy, then you create FUD, then you copy some more”.

OK, so the idea of a Virtual Appliance is a natural progression to virtualization, but shouldn’t Virtual Iron be creating new concepts? Shouldn’t they be focusing on developing new technologies that VMware hasn’t come up with already? Shouldn’t they be pushing the envelope?

Maybe they are and I’m just not seeing it. Am I wrong?

Virtual Iron - Speak up and tell me I’m wrong!

(Side thought: Shouldn’t VMware have trademarked the term “Virtual Appliance”?)

My buddy Rich at http://www.gotitsolutions.com/ has recently released a Open Source Backup Virtual Appliance. You can read about it on his blog here.

You can download the Appliance here.

Suprise, suprise. A blogger from Technet wasn’t impressed with Dianne Greene’s keynote this morning. They were demo-ing VDI onstage while the “employee” was “working”. (Personally I want a job that let’s me play Windows 3d Pinball and watch “Office Space”.) He also said that Dianne didn’t deliver an “ah-ha” moments.

True, Dianne isn’t a “great” public speaker. When I say that, I mean she doesn’t excite people. Neither speech yesterday or today excited me. That being said, her speech finally sold me on Virtual Appliances.

Why buy a separate OS and application? The OS will need to be tweaked to work optimally for your hardware, and the app for the OS. Instead, give me a Virtual appliance where the application and OS are optimized specifically for each other. No competing processes, just performance. Honestly, isn’t that the point of an OS? To provide applications optimized access to hardware resources? Why do I always need to deal with all of the “optimizations” that Windows (or Linux) plugs in if I don’t need them?

Obviously Microsoft wouldn’t be excited by this. Virtual Appliances only stand to lower the “value” of Windows. Of course, we all know my feelings about Microsoft.

You can read the technet post here.

Tags: VMworld 2006

I’m sitting here in Dianne Greene’s keynote this morning and I’m listening to here talk about a new concept behind virtual appliances. VMware is selling this new idea of getting away from the old standard of installing an operating system to host your applications.

Instead they are promoting this new idea of working with ISV’s to develop Virtual Appliances that you can install. You no longer need to purchase an OS and then tune it to work efficiently with a specific application. When you buy your application you get a virtual appliance that you can just plug into your virtual infrastructure. This is also exciting when you talk about debugging problems. Now you can just ship the VM to support.

Tags: VMworld 2006

VMware has announced the winners of their Virtual Appliance competition. A virtual appliance is a combined OS / Application that provides a specific function. All you need to do is simply download, and start it up.

You can read all about the winning appliances here:

http://www.vmware.com/news/releases/uvac_winners.html