I only found a couple of topics discussing anything relative to VMware... but I swear I recall reading threads about it. Search didn't turn up anything for me... ANYWAY....

I am finally getting my feet wet in VMware. I have quickly come to enjoy the concept of Virtual Appliances... I set up a fully functional email gateway server for AV and spam filtering with Webmin to control it in little to no time at all. Now with this system fully configured I can change very few config elements and redeploy it at another location quickly with my settings in place.

On that note... I am curious what other appliances are quite stable and robust that some of you may use?...or simply what are some other concepts to explore with VMware? I have a ton of hardware to use as a testbed and I am simply looking to play and learn.

11/17/2006 7:38:04 PM

http://www.rpath.com

11/17/2006 7:43:00 PM

we use VMWare at work to setup build machines to compile our software. So one build machine can run at least 4 VMs with a combination of Linux and Windows guest OS's to build all our software in parallel.

The only limitation I've found is to run a native x64 guest OS you must run your host OS (we'll say Windows Server 2003 x64) on a new Intel Xeon Dual Core processor since those (and the AMD64 processors) are the only Intel processors that support some Virtualization Technology to run the x64 guest OS. The boss is letting us buy spiffy new servers.

I also VMWare Workstation to test all our software since its snapshot capability lets me have a tree of multiple snapshots to test against various OS configs. I can always test on a clean system that way.

I dont know if I would trust using a pre-build virtual machine though, I'm a fan of setting up the system myself.

11/17/2006 10:04:57 PM

I am looking for good proof of concept packages right now... definitely don't want to just throw any random pre-built system into a production environment

I picked up a couple of dual core Xeon servers to act as my test rigs... so for the next couple of weeks I am going to just build a couple of different setups and see what I like. If you have any suggestions for concept, I am all ears.

11/18/2006 8:14:11 PM