VMs in your feed reader? Oh yes!

Has the idea of distributing your virtual appliances via an RSS feed ever entered your mind? No? Me neither. I had never thought someone would even contemplate distributing VMs like that, but sure enough someone much smarter than me has. If you are familiar with how podcasting works, VMcasting should be familiar waters. Simply but, VMcasting enables Virtual Appliances builders to distribute their appliances via a standard RSS feed with enclosures.

VMcasting is an automatic virtual machine deployment mechanism based on RSS2.0 whereby virtual machine images are transferred from a server to a client securely delivering files containing a technical specification and virtual disk image.

VMcasting promises Amazon's EC2 AMI, Xen, Vmware, Parallels, Windows VHD, and Qemu support, so whatever your poison is they should support it. Subscribing to your favorite Virtual Appliances has never been easier. As the Gallery 2.2 release is getting closer, we also need to rebuild a new version of the Gallery Appliance with the new version included. Perhaps we should also consider distributing it this way?

Posted by Christian Mohn aka h0bbel