Eight great virtual appliances for VMware, free for the downloading

Virtual appliances are great for the same reasons physical appliances took the IT world by storm: They make deployment a snap -- even instantaneous -- while at the same time reducing costs. It's a formula that made hardware-based appliances immensely popular for network security, backup, storage networking, file services, email, and many other single-focus solutions.

By leveraging open source solutions, and shedding the hardware entirely, virtual appliances can push the cost savings to whole new level: completely free. You'll find an increasing number of open source projects available for download in virtual machine formats for Xen, VirtualBox, VMware, and other virtualization platforms. Naturally, the virtual appliance is especially handy when the solution stitches together a host of components or relies on an entire LAMP stack. Why build it yourself when you can download the whole installation, already pre-configured?

In short, with the rise in popularity of virtualization and server consolidation, IT pros have many other options, options that offer all of the pros of a physical appliance, with very few of the drawbacks. Even when the software is proprietary, a virtual appliance costs less than a physical hardware appliance. And then there are all the other advantages of virtualization: The ability to run multiple virtual appliances on a single server, the ability to migrate virtual appliances from one server to another, and the ability to back up a virtual appliance almost instantly. All of these capabilities play well into disaster recovery and business continuity planning and help make virtual appliances a "must consider" technology for businesses large and small.

Before diving into the widening world of virtual appliances, there is no better way to experiment than with virtual appliances that are free to use and meet unique needs in an enterprise. Listed below are some of the free standouts that we have come across over the years, all of which offer enough features and capabilities to make the transition from an experimental virtual appliance to a line-of-business solution...

Opsview monitoring

Opsview Community Edition 3.8 is free, open source enterprise network and application monitoring software that is available as a virtual appliance for VMware player. However, it can be converted to run on VMware ESX or ESXi by using the free VMware vCenter Converter tool.

Opsview is built on Nagios, an open source enterprise management platform. Opsview adds enhancements to notifications and alerting (both in terms of controls and methods), support for SNMPv3 with MRTG, flap detection, faster importing, and improved uptime checks. In addition to the VMware appliance, Opsview Community Edition can be downloaded as source or binaries for RHEL 5, CentOS 5, Debian, Ubuntu, and Solaris 10.

Opsview offers some unique features that make it a formidable management tool, such as support for monitoring virtual servers and a variety of hardware components found throughout the network. Normally, an advanced management tool like Opsview would be difficult to install and configure -- however, most of the pain of installation is eliminated with the virtual appliance version of the product, where initial setup takes only a matter of minutes. The browser-based GUI is informative and easy to navigate, making it a snap to add devices to be monitored and to define dashboards that offer meaningful information. The Community edition is offered under a GPL license, while a more advanced version of the product that includes support is offered under a subscription model. Managers of smaller, simpler networks may find everything in the free version to meet their needs.

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