VMWare is a pretty amazing product and it just got better with their announcement that the server is now free.
I downloaded the latest server beta today. It was painless. I pulled down and installed the server and the install was trivial (no reboot required!). I then pulled down a pre-built “virtual machine” from BEA found on the Virtual Machine Center website.
The download was around 1.6GB so it took a while to pull it down (a couple of hours) … but once I got it down I unzipped it (expanded to about 5GB on disk) and then opened it immediately in the VM management console. I started the Virtual Machine and within about 1 minute – a fully configured Red Hat ES system running the full BEA product line was up and running. No configuration, no installation, no weird OS patches.
Here’s my running system after about 3 minutes from unzip to running the Weblogic Workshop:
Pretty amazing? Think about what this does to distribution of software?
We’re now considering this as how we distribute our software products, especially for development and evaluation purposes. Since we have a number of third-party products we work with, getting all the right pieces to play nice together in a simple manner is always a challenge – even with a solid installation process and quality documentation. VMWare can change the entire equation – instantly.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Other popular articles you might enjoy:
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
