Come on in, the water's fine: Microsoft Virtual Appliances
[Updates below: on activation, on vhd files.]
New in the Virtual Appliances Marketplace: Microsoft's new virtual appliances. Simply download the self-extracting archive, and then you can use VMware Workstation, Server, or Player to automatically import and run the virtual appliance inside.
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition Virtual Appliance
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Virtual Appliance
- Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition Virtual Appliance
- Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006 Virtual Appliance
- Internet Explorer 6 Application Compatibility Virtual Appliance (listing temporarily removed -- see below)
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Evaluation Virtual Appliance (listing temporarily removed -- see below)
Enjoy. Let's all thank Microsoft for helping expand the world of virtual appliances.
[Update: Evidently importing the machine may be trigger the Windows activation clock. Commenter mcp ended up with a 3-day deadline, but I don't know for which appliance. Note that some of these images (the first 4) are part of the "VHD Test Drive" program, and are 30-day trials. Correspondent Michael reported that he got the full 30 day trial with them inside VMware Workstation. The other two (and I believe there are an additional two more out there) are not from the VHD Test Drive program and your mileage may vary. More updates as I get more information.]
[Update II: The IE6 Compatibility Appliance contains just a .vhd file (a virtual disk, equivalent to a VMware .vmdk file). The VMware appliance team is developing some better instructions on how to use these within the VMware platform, and in the meantime has disabled them in our directory, just to avoid confusion for now. Note: you're wecome to download them from MS -- they're easy to find with a quick search.]
Posted by VMTN on December 13, 2006 in virtual appliances
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When opened in a Vmware product, these disk images require product activation... which fails if you try to activate. At least in Vware Server and Vmware Player.
Hence they only seem to work with MS Virtual PC (I tried 2004).
Any way to avoid this?
Posted by: Anonymous | December 14, 2006 at 04:09 AM
Yes, it's rather pointless to use these virtual appliances in vmware. The conversion changes the hardware. We have only three days to play with it. You should mention this.
Posted by: mcp | December 14, 2006 at 08:24 AM
The IE VM has a EULA restriction against converting the VHD to any other format. I didn't need to convert it, but it blue screens on start up.
Posted by: c2v3m2n | December 15, 2006 at 11:28 AM
Actually, when you 'import' a virtual appliance into Workstation, it actually leaves the VHD alone and does not convert it. I believe it's basically adding a linked clone on top of it so that the original file isn't touched. I was able to run the Windows Server 2003 R2 "Test Drive" fine inside Workstation in that way.
The additional instructions were for when you only have a vhd file, not a vmc file (the equivalent of VMware's vmx file).
Posted by: jtroyer | December 15, 2006 at 11:33 AM
I tried to run a .vhd Project / SharePoint demo image on VMWare Desktop for Linux and it crashed. Tried it again after converting with WinImage to .vdk and it crashed with a memory allocation error. Using Ubuntu, perhaps this is an issue?
Posted by: Borg Collective | August 27, 2008 at 05:11 AM