Preconfigured Virtual Machines?

Question

I was looking at using Amazon's EC2 service after reading this article: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-javadev2-4/index.html

But then I wondered if there's any sense in paying for the service if really all I'm interested in is using one of their preconfigured VMs for getting java web application off the ground quickly. The article recommends one particular VM that has tomcat and MySQL already loaded on it. Is there anywhere to download VMs like that? I have VMWare Fusion on OS X, but haven't really looked into this area too much to know if VMs are particular to which software they're running on but I imagine they are. Ex: I can't run a Parallels VM with VMWare Fusion.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Answer 1

What you are looking for is called VMWare appliances

Answer 2

I think this may be what your looking for: http://www.vmware.com/appliances/

Answer 3

I believe the basic problem is that the Sun license does not permit redistribution in the way done with a virtual appliance.

You should, however, be able to get up and running very quickly by e.g. choosing an Ubuntu and run "apt-get install sun-java6-jdk" to get Java, etc.