VMware Announces UVAC Winners

muff1253 writes to tell us VMware yesterday announced the winners of the Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge (UVAC). The contest, which started at the end of February, was designed to test teams on their ability to create a "pre-built, pre-configured, and ready-to-run" application that could be packaged with operating systems in virtual machines.

For the lazy

[andrewman327]

From TFA:

First prize was awarded to Mikko Hiltunen, Erno Kuusela, Joachim Viide, Mika Seppänen and Jani Kenttälä of Oulu, Finland, for creating HowNetWorks. HowNetWorks is an always-on, all-in-one, personal network troubleshooting console for those tired of the "laborious work" of network debugging. No more writing complicated sniffer filters, no more searching for ways to reproduce failures. HowNetWorks takes the next step in sniffer evolution-simply fetch the relevant data and throw it to your favorite analyzer.

Second prize was awarded to Andrew Macdonell, Michael Closson, Paul Nalos and Paul Lu of Edmonton, Alberta, for creating the Trellis NAS Bridge Appliance. The Trellis NAS Bridge Appliance makes it simple to access files across the network regardless of location, operating system or type of file sharing technology (SSH, NFS, SMB, etc.). It simplifies file access while maintaining security.

Third prize was awarded to Michael C. Jett of Senath, Mo., and Kennieth A. Goodwin of Paragould, Ark., for creating Sieve Firewall. Sieve Firewall makes it easy for Windows users to set up and use a transparent bridging firewall without having to learn Linux. The virtual appliance is managed by a Windows GUI application. The resulting XML configuration files are loaded to the Sieve Firewall virtual appliance and filtering can be up and running in minutes. Because the firewall is completely invisible to the outside world, it is not vulnerable to attacks that target more traditional firewalls. Not only can this appliance be used to create safe home networks, it can be used to manage and prioritize traffic in a multi-department, complex business network.

More info available here [vmware.com].

Re:Umm... why?

[Anonymous Coward]

99% of the time, you're using VMWare because you have to run two different OSes, not because you want to. For instance, you would run it on a desktop because you're addicted to Linux, but you have that one little Windows app holding you back.

That may have been the case in the past, but now with VMotion, the advantage for servers is huge. It can simplify backups, isolate failure, and you can upgrade your hardware incrementally without ever having to move your OS/apps to a new box. Even if we didn't use both linux and windows, we would use VMWare at our office for just the windows servers. Running multiple OSes is still a good reason too, but I question your 99%.

Re:Umm... why?

[Anonymous Coward]

but the fact is, 99% of the time, you're using VMWare because you have to run two different OSes

Maybe in your world but that is a small part of what using virtualization is about. You are looking at things from a desktop and software view, you need to think about virtualization big picture. I am not going to present a powerpoint presentation as I can not give the big picture view in a /. post but, the bigger picture you look at, the more the concept of virtualization makes sense for many uses. It is not for every process, every server, or every company either. Here [vmware.com] is a good place to start. Redundancy, load balancing, uptime, ease of upgrading and adding new hardware, monitoring, and automation, reduction in costs to name some of the big reasons.

In our organization, we swapped about 15 3-5years old servers that were no longer under warranty. We replaced them with 3 new physical servers and VMWare ESX. Without VMWare, we would have to either consolidate server processes onto less new machines, or buy 15 new servers (an assload faster then we needed even for a middle of the road server like a HP DL380 G4) and maintain status quo. This whole process of conversion was completed without having to reinstall a single OS or configure any new installs. We used the P2V tools (physical to virtual tools) to convert the existing install base to the virtual servers. We now have complete redundancy for all of our physical hardware which we did not have before AND we bought 12 less servers. The setup required more space on our SAN but less space in the physical servers which is the industry goal with "space consolidation" anyway. Of course we had some older servers that were not moved over to VMWare, they are very IO and memory intensive. They would work in VMWare but we do not want to drag down a whole VM server because of one virtual machines load requirements.

I do not work for a virtualization company so no plugs are intended here. I do realize the industry is going this route and not because everyone else is doing it or because it is the newest buzz word, it just makes good sense in many situations.

Why virtual machines make sense

[pp]

As a coworker of the winning team, the main reason for doing an appliance version (apart from participating in this contest) was packaging. We actually do have a "native" windows port of the code (using python, pygtk etc.), and it's about 25 MB zipped when containing all the dependancies, of which there is really way too many to ask a random user to install so it all has to be packaged into the same thing, really.

The vmware image is about 72 MB bzip2-compressed which includes a stripped-down Ubuntu, X11 etc. And it runs on Windows, any random Linux distro that might have an old pygtk/cairo/whatnot that doesn't work with our code, OS X (with OS X vmware) out of the box. Nice even if you do lose some performance and run into issues inherent to virtualization (accurate timestamps and promiscuous mode inside the virtual machine are tricky and do have limitations!).

We mostly run and develop it natively ourselves (on FC5 and OS X), yet we run into "AAARGH! How do I get
a new enough Y for OS X to run this" discussions every week or so.