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?
3 Comments so far
vmwarewolf | VMware and Virtualization, on February 10, 2007 at 1:58am, said:
Virtualization Blogs VMs in your feed reader? Oh yes! (Feb 10, 2007) VMware Workstation 6.0 hits beta 3 (Feb 09, 2007) New ways to save on virtualization (Feb 09, 2007) The Hidden Costs of Virtualization (Feb 09, 2007) QLogic's iSCSI HBAs support VMware
Edit Comment
Dugie's Pensieve, on February 11, 2007 at 2:46am, said:
VMcasting, deploying Virtual Machine via RSS...
I saw this in H0bbel's post , and I must say I really like this idea from VMcasting.org : VMcasting is...
Edit Comment
PC Blade Daily Links 2007-02-13 - PC Blade Daily - Practical News and Views on Centralized Computing, on February 13, 2007 at 4:49pm, said:
[...] h0bbel: 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.” [...]
Edit Comment