Welcome to the Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge Forum!

[Daryll]

Are you up for the challenge?[/b]

Are you up for the challenge of creating the industry’s most innovative virtual appliance? VMware invites you to put your skills to the test, go head-to-head with your peers, and develop the best virtual appliance the industry has ever seen. Using open source or freely distributable components and/or your own code, create the most inventive and useful virtual appliance and win the $100,000 first prize! The Challenge is open to anyone worldwide and will be judged by a panel of industry experts with input from the community.

Entry information and Challenge rules[/b]

The rules and information on how to get entered into the challenge can be found at:

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/challenge/rules.html

As always, anything related to the Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge can be posted here. Questions, comments, taunts, and the like!

Thanks to everyone!

The VMTN Team

[admin]

Yeah, that's \*our* FTP server you'll need to put it on. We should probably clarify that.

[tarrysingh]

Yeah, and it better have loads of disk space given the schemes I'm hatching to cook a datacenter vmware appliance..:)

http://tarrysingh.blogspot.com

[admin]

2 Gig limit, Tarry! And (small) size is part of the judging criteria, although innovation + function count for more.

We should probably start a tips thread.

Here's my first: If you're worried about size, start with a small distro, omit the GUI, and use bz2 or rar instead of zip to compress.

[flame_]

hi all,

Just registered for the challenge and thought I would drop in to say hello.

--

flame

[larstr]

You can actually redistribute VMware Tools with the

appliance.

Can we use the VMware Tools for ESX Server? I guess the Workstation tools require X11 and I'm having some ideas about a server appliance.

Lars

[jasonboche]

Wow! Who will be awarded the fortune and glory? We'll find out in August!

Jas

[bac]

Can we use the VMware Tools for ESX Server? I guess

the Workstation tools require X11 and I'm having some

ideas about a server appliance.

The Tools from the various products are mostly the same -- obviously when new functionality is added to the Tools it will show up first in one product or another, and certain Tools features only work in certain products. But the Tools package itself is intended to be product-agnostic, so that you can install Tools in a VM and then move that VM freely between products and have everything pretty much "just work". There are always some corner cases, but that's the basic idea.

It's certainly not the case that the Workstation Tools require X11. There are different components, but vmware-guestd (the Tools daemon) definitely runs without X11, and a variety of drivers that come with the Tools also have nothing to do with X.

In any event, you are free to use the VMware Tools from any product that you want.

[tysonkey]

Why can't you consider making VMware Tools open-source, so then there's nothing to worry about, and it'll make supporting other operating systems much easier.

[bac]

Why can't you consider making VMware Tools

open-source, so then there's nothing to worry about,

and it'll make supporting other operating systems

much easier.

This is something we have discussed internally. There are a variety of factors that would have to come together in order for it to make sense for us to do this. To date we've not felt that it's the right choice, but that could of course change at some point.

[tysonkey]

I guess patents are the limiting factor?

[tysonkey]

Are OpenSolaris and Darwin based entries allowed?