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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.
Just to point out what we (Mike Jett and Kennieth Goodwin - Third Place Winners) did, we built a .NET (Pretty) GUI and basically set it up so that it generates the appropriate configuration files for Shorewall based on what the "Windows" user wants to Throttle/Block/Pass in an infinite (almost) amount of ways. That is then made into an ISO and VMware is used to run the LEAF (Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall - 2.4MB) OS w/Shorewall and the generated configuration files. Windows then has the appropriate Protocol (TCP/IP) "Un-Bound" from the physical NIC and then "Bound" to the VMware Virtual NIC which is, un-beknownst to Windows, the guest virtual machine. The virtual machine has a NIC that is bridged with the physical NIC so that it's connected to the outside world.
Basically it gives you a Windows OS with the Firewall and Security power of a Linux based machine...
Kennieth Goodwin (kenny@skyfinet.com)
but the fact is, 99% of the time, you're using VMWare because you have to run two different OSes
/. post but, the bigger picture you look at, the more the concept of virtualization makes sense for many uses. It is not for every process, every server, or every company either. Here is a good place to start. Redundancy, load balancing, uptime, ease of upgrading and adding new hardware, monitoring, and automation, reduction in costs to name some of the big reasons.
Maybe in your world but that is a small part of what using virtualization is about. You are looking at things from a desktop and software view, you need to think about virtualization big picture. I am not going to present a powerpoint presentation as I can not give the big picture view in a
In our organization, we swapped about 15 3-5years old servers that were no longer under warranty. We replaced them with 3 new physical servers and VMWare ESX. Without VMWare, we would have to either consolidate server processes onto less new machines, or buy 15 new servers (an assload faster then we needed even for a middle of the road server like a HP DL380 G4) and maintain status quo. This whole process of conversion was completed without having to reinstall a single OS or configure any new installs. We used the P2V tools (physical to virtual tools) to convert the existing install base to the virtual servers. We now have complete redundancy for all of our physical hardware which we did not have before AND we bought 12 less servers. The setup required more space on our SAN but less space in the physical servers which is the industry goal with "space consolidation" anyway. Of course we had some older servers that were not moved over to VMWare, they are very IO and memory intensive. They would work in VMWare but we do not want to drag down a whole VM server because of one virtual machines load requirements.
I do not work for a virtualization company so no plugs are intended here. I do realize the industry is going this route and not because everyone else is doing it or because it is the newest buzz word, it just makes good sense in many situations.
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."
The VMware web site often gives the impression that the company employs a lot of people who have no understanding of computers. The announcement has no links to the winners! The web pages don't display well in Firefox. There are numerous other flaws.
If I didn't already know that VMware is a reputable company, I would never buy anything from a company with such a clueless web site. Obviously someone at VMware thinks that non-technical people have something valuable to contribute to a technical company, even though they cannot understand what they are doing.
Winner: HowNetWorks
Second Place: Trellis NAS Bridge Appliance.
Third Place: Sieve Firewall