Virtual Appliances at VMworld 2006

We've had a great first day at the VMworld conference in Los Angeles.

VMware is taking great steps in making virtualization more accessible and easy to migrate to. One important initiative is their Virtual Appliance Marketplace - a central depot where vendors like us can list production-quality, certified commercial appliances.

Damian Reeves, Zeus CTO was invited to participate in an intimate Virtual Appliance Panel, immediately after Diane Greene's (VMware President) keynote speech... as intimate as you can get with 7,000 VMware experts looking on! Also participating was Satish Dharmaraj (CEO, Zimbra) and Pat Kerpan (CTO, CohesiveFT).

The panel were pretty unanimous that Virtual Appliances - a combination of software and OS packaged up for easy install on virtual infrastructure - were a great advance, both for software developers and for customers. However, the expected standards are high, and virtual appliances are much more sophisticated than the many ad hoc virtual machines that different organizations have produced. Customers rightly expect very high quality VA products, self managed, easy to configure, and so tightly integrated that the underlying OS is completely concealed.

We've built our ZXTM VA product to meet these standards, and it's been certified by VMware in their VA Certification Program! We're in a very fortunate position because our core technology is pure software, so we're able to deploy it on a range of platforms. If you'd like to try it out, you'll find a free evaluation download at http://www.zeus.com/downloads/.

Owen Garrett [Zeus Dev Team] 07 November 2006