We (Zeus Technology) have been working with VMware recently to launch a VMware appliance containing our Traffic Manager (ZXTM). The appliance is freely distributable, and contains a development version of our software (max simultaneous connection restrictions). What is particularly pleasing is that the appliance doesn’t look like a normal Linux boot – there are none of the bootup messages that confuse non-technical people.
Thankfully no one had to be awake at 5am when the website was updated, we just scripted ZXTM to automatically switch which content it was serving at the appropriate time. When I woke up this morning it all seemed to have worked ok which is always a nice feeling.
We are very excited about this, as it means that customers can evaluate the software without finding an extra bit of hardware to run it on. We managed to get the image to just 65mb compressed which is a lot smaller than we first thought. Many thanks to philipl for answering my many questions about building images, and the rest of the vmware team for their quality products!
In other news Galeon 2.0.1 was released yesterday, this release makes type-ahead-find work properly with Firefox 1.5, and makes Galeon build with xulrunner (although not on debian without patching due to their packaging of xulrunner).