Virtualization Daily

I’ve been covering a lot of announcements from other companies here on Virtualization Daily but today it’s time to make an announcement about my new company JumpBox. This is launch week for JumpBox and it’s been really exciting and should also make it clearer why I’m so interested in the virtual appliance concept.

At JumpBox we work with independent software vendors (ISV) to simplify the deployment of complex server based applications. We do this by turning the application into a virtual appliance. A virtual appliance is the bundling of a minimal operating system, the application and some management tools into a virtual computer. The appliance is then deployed on top of a virtualization system like VMWare, Xen or Parallels. The provided management tools assist with configuration of the appliance and enable licensing and updating of the appliance.

To demonstrate an early release of our platform, we’ve posted an example appliance that bundles the vTiger Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application into a virtual appliance. This appliance when combined with the free VMWare player makes running the server based vTiger application no harder than running a desktop application. This is also the first virtual appliance released that will work on VMWare, Xen and Parallels and can be moved easily between those systems. So you could start out testing and initial rollout on Windows with the VMWare player or Mac OS X with Parallels and then easily move the same appliance with all the data intact to a Linux server running Xen or VMWare server.

Also, with our support for Parallels we’re introducing the concept of virtual appliances to the Mac OS X market where Parallels has a large install base. Right now we have the vTiger CRM appliance available, and in the coming weeks we’ll be releasing a few more example applications that should be of interest to Mac OS X users.

So what we have with JumpBox is an exciting new platform that enables ISVs to seamlessly deploy their application across Windows, Linux and Mac OS X on Intel without having to do any porting and that provides an installation experience for the end user that’s as easy as a typical desktop application. We’re just getting started, but are extremely excited about the prospects in this space.