Last week we announced that Six Apart and JumpBox have been working together to vastly simplify the deployment of Movable Type Pro. This new product called “Virtual Movable Type by JumpBox” is a JumpBox virtual appliance that bundles all the components required to run Movable Type together in a single module that deploys in minutes. For Movable Type this represents a vast simplification of their present install process and is a great confirmation of what we’ve been working on at JumpBox.
“The virtual appliance makes it radically easier to get started and allows anyone to quickly experience the flexibility, scalability and power of Movable Type,” said Ed Anuff, EVP and GM of the Movable Type Division at Six Apart. “You can get up and running immediately, while reducing the cost of configuration and maintenance. And it’s a snap for anyone who wants to evaluate the platform to get started, whether that’s on a desktop running VMWare or Parallels, a large-scale deployment on Amazon’s EC2 or anything in between.”
Distributing software in this way is a huge step forward for ISVs like Six Apart, it allows them to put their software into less technical people’s hands and to give them a good experience while doing it.
Just wondering if anyone heading to VMWorld in Las Vegas next week would like to meet? I’ll be at VMWorld Tues-Thurs and would love to hear some experiences with JumpBox, virtual appliances and virtualization or cloud computing in general. If you’re going and would like to meet feel free to contact me through the JumpBox site.
It looks like Ubuntu has made their JeOS (Just Enough OS) version available for download as a 151MB ISO image. JeOS is based on Ubuntu 7.10. There doesn’t seem to be much other information available beyond their original press release.
JeOS was announced a few months ago, but had been vapor up to this point. It’s a stripped down version of Ubuntu Linux designed for the creation of virtual appliances. There’s more to creating a quality virtual appliance than just a stripped down OS, but that’s a good starting point.
Here’s the full announcement.
The Ubuntu team is happy to announce the first release of Ubuntu JeOS,
Ubuntu JeOS 7.10. Pronounced "juice", Ubuntu JeOS (Just Enough Operating
System) is an efficient variant of Ubuntu configured specifically for
virtual appliances.
ISVs looking to develop virtual appliances will have a compelling platform
in Ubuntu JeOS, an OS optimised for virtualisation that greatly reduces the
complexity and maintenance overhead normally associated with general purpose
operating systems. Ubuntu JeOS Edition has been tuned to take advantage of
key performance technologies of the latest virtualisation products from
VMware. This combination of reduced size and optimized performance ensures
that Ubuntu JeOS Edition delivers a highly efficient use of server resources
in large virtual deployments.
You can read more about Ubuntu JeOS in the following press release:
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-jeos
To Get Ubuntu JeOS 7.10
-----------------------
The JeOS 7.10 CD image for x86 systems can be found at:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/jeos/releases/gutsy/release/
Currently JeOS is available as a 32-bit flavor only.
About Ubuntu
------------
Ubuntu is a Linux distribution for desktop, server and mobile, which is fast
to install and easy to run. The Ubuntu project makes no distinction between
a free edition and an enterprise edition - our best work is freely available
to all.
Used by businesses, home users, schools, and governments around the world,
Ubuntu offers regular releases, a selection of excellent packages installed
by default and professional commercial technical support from Canonical, the
commercial sponsor of the project.
You can find out more about Ubuntu and about this release on our website,
IRC channel, and wiki. If you are new to Ubuntu, please visit:
http://www.ubuntu.com/
To sign up for future Ubuntu announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu's
very low volume announcement list at:
http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce
Disclaimer for anyone who doesn’t know, I’m the CEO of JumpBox.
After a quiet couple months, things are really cracking now with JumpBox. We had some great stuff queued up that took a lot longer to get out than I expected. The funny thing is that the product was ready, but it took a while to line up the rest of the pieces. So what have we been up to?
Well …
Nov. 1 we announced a partnership with Microsoft and support for Microsoft virtualization in all JumpBox virtual appliances.
We followed that up on Nov. 7 with a joint announcement with Virtual Iron that all JumpBoxes now support their platform.
So what this means is that JumpBox now provides a single virtual machine download that will run the same on any VMWare product, Parallels, Microsoft Virtual PC/Virtual Server, Virtual Iron and Xen Open Source. Now that’s portability. One download, run it on Mac, Windows, Linux using the virtualization platform of your choice. It’s simple, quick, flexible and powerful, everything software should be.
That’s some pretty cool stuff, but we weren’t quite done yet, so today we announced the release of the JumpBox Proving Grounds and eight new JumpBoxes. The Proving Grounds is our beta user community which we are using to get new JumpBoxes into people’s hands much faster. We released eight beta JumpBoxes today, and here’s a secret, there’s seven more sitting in the queue. Want to check them out, then get your invite now.
Here’s what’s available today to people who join the Proving Grounds.
BTW, we’re also doing a joint Webinar with Virtual Iron on December 12 so if you want to learn more about JumpBox or Virtual Iron it’s a great opportunity. You can signup here.
I’m curious to know whether people find Open Source or commercial software based virtual appliances more interesting so that’s the topic for the latest poll. Click here to provide your input.
This was a really long running poll, but an interesting one. The question was “What do you see as the biggest barrier to adoption for virtual appliances?” Here are the results.
- Performance concerns 24% - This isn’t too surprising to me, I seem to constantly hear about how virtualization doesn’t perform well enough for production use. Whether that’s true or not is another question, but it is a common concern.
- Concerns about trusting the appliance builder 19% - To me this is a really important one. Your basically downloading a virtual computer and plugging it into your network. The risk with that is huge and it’s extremely important that you trust the appliance builder.
- Management tool support 13% - Clearly coming from an enterprise perspective virtual appliances need to fit cleanly into the management infrastructure, but I’m a little surprised to see this beating out things like security concerns.
- Limited customization options 13% - When we first started working on building virtual appliances we expected this to be a huge issue for users. It turns out to be less of a problem than we originally expected, so again surprised it beat out security.
- Security concerns 11% - This one’s surprising, I would have expected it to be near the top as it’s such a common criticism of virtual appliances.
- Concerns about getting support 11% - Not much to say about this other than it matches roughly what I’m seeing in the real world.
- Too few appliances available 9% - Now this is really interesting, maybe I should have phrased it “too few quality appliances available”. Despite the numbers that VMWare throws around there really aren’t that many quality virtual appliances available.
Overall some interesting results, now it’s time to finally put this one to rest and think up a new poll.
From SearchServerVirtualization, Virtual appliances spawn new class of Linux distros”
As virtualization continues to permeate IT shops, many independent software vendors (ISVs) are distributing software as Linux virtual appliances: preconfigured virtual machines that include the application’s entire stack, including the operating system (OS). But industry experts say that end users should research and understand the design of these virtual appliances before bringing them into their environment.
Citrix, the recent acquirer of XenSource, has now announced the roll out of evaluation virtual appliances for Citrix Presentation Server.
The new Citrix Evaluation Virtual Appliance (EVA) is a preconfigured, ready-to-go, virtual machine system for evaluating Presentation Server Enterprise 4.5 and Platinum Edition 4.5. The EVA enables you to download a completely configured Presentation Server environment and have it up and running in as little as 10 minutes after download. This new, simplified evaluation method enables you to interact with the Citrix management interface, and evaluate Citrix’s application delivery infrastructure from both administrative and end-user perspectives. You have 30 days to evaluate Presentation Server with your own applications and, because you don’t need additional server hardware or rack space in the data center, the evaluation process can be done quickly, with minimal impact to regular operations.
These are Microsoft VHD images for use with Microsoft Virtual Server and embed an evaluation version of Windows. No Xen support included.
Raritan has announced a new virtual appliance for their CommandCenter NOC product. This is another hardware appliance being converted into a virtual appliance although it appears they’ll support the production deployment of the virtual appliance.
SOMERSET, N.J., Aug. 20 /PRNewswire/ — Raritan today announced that its network and systems monitoring appliance has gone virtual. Designed for small and midsized organizations needing integrated IT health monitoring and asset management capabilities at an affordable price, Raritan’s CommandCenter(R) NOC (CC-NOC) is now available as a virtual appliance for even easier deployment.
As a virtual appliance, CC-NOC easily and quickly introduces an integrated and rich toolset for IT organizations to use to improve overall service availability, network performance, security and asset management — at a fraction of the cost of ownership and complexity of other solutions. CC-NOC Virtual Appliance, which leverages VMware virtualization software, can run on standard hardware already in the customer’s environment, thus simplifying or eliminating hardware procurement and deployment issues.
As a virtual appliance, CC-NOC easily and quickly introduces an integrated and rich toolset for IT organizations to use to improve overall service availability, network performance, security and asset management — at a fraction of the cost of ownership and complexity of other solutions. CC-NOC Virtual Appliance, which leverages VMware virtualization software, can run on standard hardware already in the customer’s environment, thus simplifying or eliminating hardware procurement and deployment issues.
The CC-NOC Virtual Appliance is agent-less, pre-built and pre-configured with the application, database, operating system and Web server. Available starting today, the downloadable solution can be purchased through Raritan’s partner network or by visiting http://www.commandcenter-noc.com/. A free trial version of CC-NOC can also be downloaded from Raritan’s Web site. CC-NOC solutions can support environments from five servers to 500 servers. Pricing starts at $1,795.
Read the rest of the release…
Levanta has released a virtual appliance for evaluation of their Linux Management system. Levanta is a hardware appliance company who’s now dabbling in the virtual appliance space. This first release looks to be just an evaluation version that is then up-sold to a hardware appliance for production deployment.
Download Levanta’s Intrepid VM, and see how Levanta’s solution can give you the Linux systems management you’ve been looking for. Execute Linux provisioning, patch management, rollback, disaster recovery, and migration using a pre-installed virtual appliance.
The virtual appliance allows you to manage up to three servers.
Virtualization and Virtual Appliance news, tips and opinions. 
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