Without much fanfare, VMware recently released a free version of their product: VMware Player. At first glance, I didn’t really understand how important this was. But when more and more virtual machines were added to the Virtual Machine Center, it hit me: VMware Player is going to be a huge boon for software development, not just the typical testing/QA that VMware has typically targeted.
Think about this: how often do you find yourself installing Oracle 11i or Postgres or mySQL on your desktop when starting a new project? What about OpenLDAP? Apache web server? WebLogic? Or worse, WebSphere? Don’t you just hate how they pollute your system when you only need them for one project? Or worse, when you get a new machine you have to eventually re-install all these random pieces of software.
VMware Player provides a way out for people who typically aren’t given the tools that VMware provides. That is, testing professionals and QA managers usually are given budget for some nice VMware software. But rarely do software developers, let alone every single developer, get their hands on virtualization technology. Now they can, for free.
Over the weekend I installed VMware Player, downloaded the freely available VMs, and began setting up a few different VM snapshots with some of the common services I need on my development computers: OpenLDAP, mySQL, and Oracle 11i. When I am done, I will have a handful of customized VMs sitting on my external hard drive, ready to be launched on any machine I’m working on. Now when I need to write some code that works with LDAP, I don’t have to hunt down an LDAP server and install it. I can just crack open my LDAP VM and get to writing code right away.
Are there any VMs you would like to see? I plan to create a collection of developer-centric VMs to share with the community. Let me know what you’d like to see and I’ll try to make it happen (or at least keep an active list).
on Jan 23rd, 2006 at 3:22 pm
VMWare rocks!
Last weekend, my brother finally showed me VMWare. I had heard about it some time ago, but never had the time to actually try this out. After downloading evaluated one of the pre-built virtual machines, using the VMPlayer I decided to download the Wor…
on Jan 23rd, 2006 at 4:46 pm
Pat, this is indeed interesting, but I’m a bit confused - I went to the VMWare Player page, and read through the feature comparison. It seems that you can’t create new virtual machines with Player (hence the name I guess), then how did you create multiple installations?
on Jan 23rd, 2006 at 4:48 pm
Jing,
Good point. I’m not “creating” new VMs as much as I’m making copies of existing VMs, tweaking them (ie: installing OpenLDAP), and then zipping them up for safe keeping. In a sense I’m creating a new one, but I’m not creating it in the sense that VMware means. That is, I can’t install a brand new OS, such as Windows XP, but I can certainly mutate existing snapshots.
on Jan 24th, 2006 at 12:52 am
Yes, I definitely agree: VMPlayer will be a huge help when it comes to creating easy-to-use developer installations, both of single software and bundles (like an appserver, an LDAP server, and a database). Even Linux-noobs such as me can now use it with relative ease. Very nice indeed!
on Aug 9th, 2006 at 2:36 am
Hi Pat,
I’m very interested in your VM-Ware images for 11i . (I always wanted to install it on my Laptop, but was too busy) .
It would be nice if you could contact me,
cheers, Enno