At VMworld today, VMware announced a new VMware Ready program featuring an improved test matrix incorporating improved specifications and practices for Virtual Appliances.
This new standard codifies many of the features that our appliances have had since 2006 and we are pleased to see these standards being put into practice throughout the Virtual Appliances ecosystem.
Our page on the program is HERE
NTOP is a realtime network traffic monitoring application, now available as a ready to use Virtual Appliance.
Our NTOP Appliance has been available with VMware ESXi as an OVF since June, and is now available exclusively for VMware Player, Workstation and Server.
This appliance is an essential network management tool. You will easily learn about what network devices use the network and when. This information can be used for diagnostics, trouble shooting, capacity planning, or just learning about the nature of your network.
The fix for the static IP configuration bug (previously reported on the forums) has been pushed to our APT repository.
Run the appropriate aptitude update and aptitude safe-upgrade commands to rebuild your APT index cache and apply any available fixes.
It is recommended to do this occasionally in order to receive all Ubuntu updates as well.
In the early days of VM adoption, it always seemed to me that a likely use for a virtual appliance is for infrastructure monitoring tools. Judging by the user base and feedback we have received from users of our Cacti VA, I am not the only one who has shared this vision.
Some prime examples of Open Source monitoring tools include:
Virtual Appliances could provide any one of these as an appliance model, but what are users using now? If you don’t mind sharing, how large is the infrastructure you are monitoring? We have received feedback from Cacti VA users who are monitoring hundreds (sometimes thousands) of devices, which would imply a somewhat large infrastructure.
And for those inclined, by taking the appropriate Virtual Appliance (LAMP, LAPP, or Tomcat), it’s usually possible to install most of the above with much of the dirty base OS + core package installation work already completed. FWIW, we run custom built (based upon existing Virtual Appliances) versions of OpenNMS, ntop, Cacti, and Nagios for our own (small) infrastructure monitoring needs.
Yet another WordPress upgrade… this time to 2.6.
All seems well, but please let us know if you notice something not working well.
Today VirtualAppliances.net LAMP, LAPP, Tomcat and Cacti appliances are certified for use on Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac.
Trying these appliances couldn’t be easier. Simply download, uncompress, and open into the Parallels desktop.
The latest release from Virtual Appliances runs natively on Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac. 
All appliance models (LAMP, LAPP, Cacti, and Tomcat) are supported! Simply uncompress the downloaded archive and open within Parallels Desktop. It couldn’t be any easier!
This is an excellent way to experience Ubuntu 8.04 Server Edition JeOS on your Mac running OS X.
Virtual Appliances is proud to announce support for the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF). This allows for quick importing of Virtual Appliances into VMware ESX/ESXi and other compatible virtualization platforms.
Use the Virtual Infrastructure client to open the *.OVF file and the Virtual Appliance will be instantly available for use. OVF files are optimized for streaming, which makes for quicker downloads and deployment.
For the first time ever, we are offering our entire line- LAMP, LAPP, Cacti, and Tomcat- of Virtual Appliances for both 32-bit and 64-bit VMware platforms. This includes all compatible versions VMware Player, Workstation, Server, Fusion, ESX 3.x, and ESXi.
Also available are 64-bit versions of our newly created OVF-based (Open Virtual Machine Format) appliances.
These appliances are based on Ubuntu 8.04 Server Edition (AMD 64-bit/Intel x86-64).
We are now providing RAW 32-bit images of all Virtual Appliances models.
These raw images are suitable for use with QEMU, KVM, and any virtualization platform that accepts raw disk images.
In fact, starting a raw Virtual Appliance on QEMU is as simple as:
qemu -m 256 -hda va-lamp-root.img -hdb va-lamp-swap.img
In this simple example, we are starting the LAMP VA, which like all other appliances, has separate root and swap virtual hard disks. The “-m 256″ option specifies how much memory (in MB) to allocate to the virtual machine.
Since KVM is a QEMU derivative, the command-line for spawning a Virtual Appliance is virtually identical to that of QEMU:
kvm -m 256 -hda va-lamp-root.img -hdb va-lamp-swap.img
For more information on setting up KVM on your Linux host, consult your distributions documentation. For Ubuntu, the KVM entry in the community wiki might be useful.
Also, these raw images also open the door for other virtualization platforms that support importing raw disk images. Stay tuned for future blog postings!
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