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7 Kick-Ass VMware Appliances

Everybody knows about using VMware to test out operating systems – it’s a great way to sample thirteen or forty Linux distributions so you can find one you really like without reformatting your hard drive to death. But why not try out some of these interesting gems while you’re at it – VMware appliances are good for more than just testing, after all!

Hasslefree Download Appliance
No, not Hasselhoff (ok, after that horrible pun I feel obligated to point you to the baywatchOS – no lie – appliance). It’s designed to download, repair (if necessary), and unpack all the .torrent and .nzb files you can throw at it.

Ultimate Deployment Appliance
If you support more than one OS (and most of us do) this thing is begging for you to install it. Their description says “Bring your own isos, we’ll do the rest,” and they do. It’s a PXE-boot OS loading beast. Press F12 and give me a “Hell yeah!”

Personal Backup Appliance
No, I’m not responsible enough to use a program like this – like most techs I assume that burning a DVD once every three months will be enough to save my butt when my HDD crashes. This appliance aims to make backups easy – on any computer connected to your network. It’ll even clone and restore full drives.

Janus VM
If you’re one of those people like my assistant who can’t help but screw around on NSFW websites during the work day, you should at least be protecting yourself a bit. The Janus appliance encrypts traffic, hides your IP, and generally makes sure your privacy is guarded like the Hope Diamond.

Nagios VMA
Since I already mentioned the fact that I’m not very careful with my backups, it should come as no surprise that I do very little traffic monitoring on our little network. If I did, though, I’d use the impressive Nagios VMA. It’s got tons of functionality and lots of nice, colorful charts for you to page through – and USA Today’s continued success tells me everyone loves colorful charts.

Network Security Toolkit
In the same vein is this appliance, and good god does it do a ton of crap. Check out the list of included apps and functionality on the project’s home page. It’s all usable through a web gui, of course.

doknir
Dokument Nirvana? Ok, I’ll bite – what is document Nirvana? Well, apparently it’s replacing the Windows print spooler service with a fancy Kanotix-based VMA. Why? Well, no one likes it when Windows screws up and you end up with a corrupt job in the print queue that you can only remove by rebooting. Ok, yeah, now it sounds pretty useful…

Got another? Leave me a comment!

Tags: vmware   Posted in Apps, Virtualization