VirtualAppliances.net Apache Tomcat 5 Server

[VMTN_Admin]

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/96

Nano-sized virtual machines for serving web and Java content

[dmoore247]

I downloaded this and unzipped it and copied the virtual machine definition and the virtual disk on to my flash disk. The expanded files took about 112MB. The boot up went well, the appliance gets an ip address from DHCP. The system then sync's it's clocks with virtual appliances.net's time servers. Pretty cool so far.

Because of the small footprint, the boot up performed well even on a slow USB 1.1 on a slow PIII M 800MHz laptop.

However, the machine \*requires* the mounting of a shared filesystem to store the WAR files. This is probably for speed... necessary in a production type environment.

After you specify the mount point, the VM then needs to reboot.

For application demos however:

It would be nice if there were an option to load the WAR file directly into the Virtual Disk, such that the entire system could be self contained within the flash drive. Then the flash drive could be re-distributed.

I.E. "J2EE application on a stick"

While I'm putting together a wish list, how about pre-installed Oracle 10g Express.

Good job so far...

[jay_cork]

This stuff is great!!! I'll go along with dmoore247 and say that it would be great if you could load a WAR directly into virtual disk..

That aside, I am looking at running a number of these virtual tomcat instances, but at the moment it tells me that it cannot obtain a write lock on the vmx file if I try to start another instance. I want to deploy a number of web services, using Apache axis, and make the aware via JMX of a master server that devides out the work... So it would be great if we could run more than one instance at a time.

Also, where do the log messages go? Say I execute a System.out.println or use log4j where are the messages going?

Other than that, keep up the good work!

Jay

[ulss5]

Good idea but there is not a ssh login .

How to install citrix web interface?

[gtwod]

Very impressed with it so far. I am J2SE Developer trying to learn J2EE concepts and was impressed how fast after downloading the Appliance to actually developing and getting sensible results.

There is no way (that I know of) to SSH to it. That would be a great feature.

I agree with dmoore247, that some sort of database would be a nice feature.

However when I drop some example WAR files (via samba) into the webapps directory they automatically uncompressed and was available in seconds.

Another bonus is not have to download via bit torrent.

Nice work...

[EmmEff]

Thanks for the kind words! We built this entire appliance from user feedback (since our development team are not J2EE developers).

We're still looking for more feedback.

Come visit our forums @ \[url]http://forums.virtualappliances.net[/url] and leave us feedback about the Tomcat VA.

We've had requests in the past for adding a database. It is something we are considering.