I decided to jump on the bandwagon and tried out my first appliances today, using the free VMWare player, and a couple of appliances from rpath.org.

Working on Foresight, a number of the images published are for various virtualization technolgies, such as VMWare, Parallels and Xen. Following the VMWare installation instructions in the Wiki, I installed VMWare on Foresight 1.3, downloaded 2 appliances, and was up and running in about 5 minutes.

I am starting to see why these are all the rage right now (at the last TCLUG meeting, a lot of folks put Virtualization on the list for a future speaker to come talk about). From using an image for testing, to installing multiple appliances on a server for specific applications, there are some pretty cool use cases that become possible.

And yes, I know I’m late to the party on this topic, but better late than never. 🙂

Here’s a screenshot of Openfiler, a NAS appliance running in a VMWare player:

And here is a screenshot of Openfiler running, and a WordPress-Multiuser appliance just starting to boot up:

Click through to see larger versions on Flickr.