The VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace (VAM) launched in 2006 and quickly became the go-to location for finding pre-built, ready-to-run virtual appliances to run either on your Virtual Infrastructure or your desktop. Both the traffic and the number of listings grew quite quickly. Although the VMware Ready appliances are often the most featured — those are the ones you'd actually pay for and run in your production environment — to this day anyone can list a new appliance, and it's the best place to find a Linux distro or open source application and take it out either for a quick spin or a more lasting relationship.
Check out the Virtual Appliance Marketplace What's New page for more info — there are sections both for end users and for appliance creators. There are some cool new things already — like the Review section that's easier to use, and they've also changed the various appliance categories to make more sense. The juiciest new features will happen when the listing providers start to update their appliance listings, but already you can see a few appliance in their swanky new duds — see the listing for Hadoop over on the right here, where I've highlighted the new "Resources" tab, but there are more with reorganized Overview and Tech Specs tabs, as well as ones for Reviews, Support, and Download.
I was involved with launching the original version of VAM on a hacked
up version of Drupal, but I take responsibility only for the parts that
were broken or hard to use. Luckily, we had a great team designing and
building this revamped VAM 2.0. So not only does it look great, is
easier to use, has new features, and gives people easier access to
information, this new release also sets up the team for more coming
goodness in the months to come.
Congratulations to the whole team. The VAM is a largely unheralded resource that gets a huge amount of traffic and is useful to a lot of people, but doesn't really get talked about a lot. With this major update, I think we'll start to see more momentum from the VAM Team, and it's a site to keep your eyes on.
