This is huge! VMware (the most profitable division of EMC) has just announced their free VMware Player, in effect a runtime system, for virtual machines.
Crucially this isn’t just for their own VMs but also for VMs created with Microsoft‘s own virtual machine environment, Virtual PC as well as Symantec LiveState Recovery disk formats.
VMware Player also supports “Revert to previous state” which rolls back VMs to the previous ‘clean’ state within seconds; access to host CD/DVD drives, network adapters, and plug-and-play USB devices; copying and pasting of text and files along with drag and drop of files between a Windows host PC and a Windows VM; shared folders between VMs and the host PC; all of VMware’s networking options; suppot for 32- and 64-bit operating systems simultaneously on the same physical PC; and the ability to power down or suspend a VM when closing the VMware Player.
What this will foster is a whole new era of product testing: Applications will be bundled into pre-defined VM environments and their isolation from the oddities of the host system will ensure a “cleaner” evaluation process.
Already a number of pre-packaged VMs are available via VMware’s Web site directory including ones for Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, Novell Linux Desktop 9 Virtual Development Environments, and Red Hat Linux Virtual Development Environment. There’s also IBM Workplace Express, BEA Weblogic, MySQL Workplace, and Oracle 10g.
Particularly interesting is SpikeSource Core Stack. This includes SuSE/Fedora Core 3 in a virtualized image with a fully integrated LAMP Stack with “more than 50 integrated components and utilities” and the stack “is tested and certified in its entirety and supported directly by SpikeSource.” This virtual image of operating system plus stack is “fully integrated and pre-configured, and installs out-of-the-box onto VMware in about 15 minutes.”
There’s also something called the The Browser Appliance. This VM allows you to “safely browse the Internet from within a VMware VM — protecting your host PC from spyware and malware.”
Mark my words, VMware Player is the beginning of a revolution not only in demoware but also in application distribution. Just think of the potential of a pre-packaged VM environment to create a tider, more easily supported end user environment.
Watch out for a future Gearhead column on the VMware Player.
