Installation vs. Virtual Machine Images

Question

I seem to end up evaluating a lot of software. This requires me to constantly install all kinds of things on my system. It creates a huge clutter and I spend a lot of time during the install process, and if I don't like it, then removing everything I've done. Much of my evaluation tends away from the features of the software being evaluated and toward how difficult it is to install. I'm sure I miss good software which may have actually been a better choice, because of this startup cost.

With the advent of VM software like VMWare Player and VirtualBox, it would be much easier to sell someone like me your software, if you just provided an image that I could load into the VM and run. I'd be looking at the features almost immediately rather than fighting with which revision of whatever. The VM would take care of all of this for me.

Am I missing something, or should vendors and OSS start distributing VMs for their wares?

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Most of my evaluations are for server side software installed on Linux, so OS licensing is not the issue.

Answer 1

VMs require that the operating system have a valid license key. For free operating systems this wouldn't be an issue, but if you're developing for something like Windows machines, each time they send out a demo version of their software, they're sending out a license key that they would have to pay for.

This would be incredibly expensive for most companies.

Answer 2

This can be done for softwre that runs on open source platforms, and VMware have a library of images which do just this (though the images that are used for evaluating commercial software is generally for infrastructure-type things that have very, very complex installation requirements):

• http://www.vmware.com/appliances/

However, if the software is for the Windows platform, you don't really have the opportunity to do this, as Microsoft's Windows licensing would prevent it. Unless, you're Microsoft, of course, in which case you can in fact do this - and MS has done this to permit easier evaluation of such software as Visual Studio, SQL, and many others:

• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb738372.aspx?ppud=4

Answer 3

Microsoft provides fully-provisioned VM's for time-limited trials of their software. So if you want to trial select Microsoft products in that manner, you can do that today.

There is no sign, though, that Microsoft will make this available to third party Windows software vendors.

In the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) world, you can get fully-provisioned virtual servers that include Windows and your software of interest on a pay-as-you-go basis, based on both Linux and Windows. For example, see Amazon Web Services

Answer 4

For windows, you may be better off developing a portable application that runs from a usb key. That is how Embarcadero distribute All Access. I received a 4 gb usb key that contained multiple applications. Most could be run straight from the key without installation. I believe Embarcadero will be licensing the technology at some stage.

If you are using a programming language such as Delphi or C++ with little in the way of external dependencies, a portable application is straight forward to develop. For .net, it is much harder, but can be done with Mono, or something like Virtual Application Studio.

Answer 5

Novell has an appliance builder called Suse Studio that lets you pick the software you want, it builds out a VM with the software (and dependencies, etc) for you. You can then try out the VM, download it, etc.

Whether the software you're looking for is available or not is a different matter.

Disclaimer: I work for Novell (though not with the Suse team)

But yes, if you can deal with the OS licensing issues, or possibly host trial environments yourself, this is a very effective way for a vendor to demo their app. The problem is that all vendors don't always have the infrastructure (or lack the awareness) to do so.

Answer 6

The only downside I would say IMHO is the size of the images, if say you have a 20 MB application, do you really want to download/transfer an entire OS just for that application.

I would say a better approach would be to have a ready to go VM and then you simply take a snapshot (on Virtual Box, I assume similar feature exist in other players)

Then simply install the applciation inside your sandbox environment, and then just Zap it when done (i.e. return to your Snapshot)