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VMware Announces UVAC Winners
muff1253 writes to tell us VMware yesterday announced the winners of the Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge (UVAC). The contest, which started at the end of February, was designed to test teams on their ability to create a "pre-built, pre-configured, and ready-to-run" application that could be packaged with operating systems in virtual machines.
It seems like the top three winners are working in the right direction. I setup a virtual machine at home (albeit using Virtual PC) after Symantec kept quarantining all of the fun tools that I wanted to work with. Virtual machines provide a great environment for setting up network tools that might otherwise not get along with applications and services running on a production server.
'Virtual Machine' and 'Virtual Hardware' are 2 different things. This isn't a VM in that it runs JIT code. It runs an operating system in a virtual environment. VMWare wanted some killer apps for this and so they have sponsored a contest so people will create them.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
The contest was sponsored by VMware therefore it is only natural that they used their own platform. Look at the domain of TFA.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Really? Where exacty did you get this little factoid? Out of your ass maybe?
I want to run VMWare with the same OS a lot.
Sometimes I want to keep the primary OS uncluttered.
Sometimes I'm installing stuff to try that I just want to test and don't want to install on my real machine until I know the software.
Sometimes I'm installing untrusted software (something off bittorrent perhaps).
Sometimes I'm visiting untrusted websites that require IE, and if my host machine is windows I don't want to open it up to possible IE expoits.
Sometimes I'm just trying to keep my individual server apps isolated so that I can move them to different hardware if any of the apps starts getting used more and consume more resources than available on the host computer.
Personally, although I use a number of different OS's, all my machines tend to run more copies of the same OS as the host OS than of a different OS.
Actually I think it's a Good Thing to always have somebody copy/paste the article into the discussion, so that it becomes part of the thread's permanent archive.
If you go back and read Slashdot stories from more than a year or two ago (always amusing, I strongly recommend it), most of the links to articles are dead. The only threads where you can really read TFA are the ones where somebody pasted it in as a comment.
You do have a point though, it doesn't really deserve a +5 moderation; as long as the person puts "ARTICLE TEXT" in their subject line (which is also a good thing to do!) it's easy enough to find in the the thread if you want to read it, even if it's down at +1 or +2. The only reason to mod it up would be if somebody posted it AC and you wanted to make sure it was readable to people who browse at +1.
So in general, it's definitely karma-whorish, but on the other hand it's also rather useful...so who cares if people get some free points?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Well some of them might, if you had a Linux machine. By encapsulating them inside a minimalist VM image, you can make them run on any host OS. So that even if I'm running Windows, I can run a bunch of Linux network monitoring and debugging tools, without creating a Linux system and installing them. (And configuring, etc.)
If you want to do one of the tasks that one of the VMs perform, and nothing else, downloading and launching a VM is probably a lot easier than downloading a piece of software and installing it. Plus, it doesn't leave crap all over your system or risk compromising your security (as much -- obviously you're still running code, but a VMWare image can be run as a user process, I think).
Plus when you're done, you just shut the VM down and either delete the image or save it for next time.
In effect, what they do could easily be replaced with a bootable CD or DVD image (in fact, I'd be surprised if someone didn't have a VM-to-BootCD converter), with the advantage as a VM that you don't need to take down a running system in order to run them.
Plus, adding a minimalist OS like LEAF only adds 3MB or so to the program binaries, apparently -- and I don't think that the VM image format overhead is that much more than a comparable disk-image format (ISO). The downsides are less than you're making them out to be, and the convenience factors are definitely in their favor.
Does it make sense for every application to come with an entire default-install of CentOS? Certainly not; but might it be worth the overhead for some specialized, configuration-intensive application to come with its own preconfigured OS? Definitely. There are a lot of people who are capable of running a VM, who don't have the ability or the interest to set up something like Apache2/modPHP/Perl, Smoothwall, or Squid themselves. (All of which I've seen or heard talked about as VMs.) To be able to just download and run something, and have it act like a distinct server on their network? That's pretty slick.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."