Benefits of Virtualization - Part 2

Virtualization can also serve as software delivery medium. You know, like floppies, CDs and DVDs. You do sacrifice space and some CPU power, but get a controlled installation environment in exchange. This comes handy if a product you are trying to distribute takes some effort and knowledge to install correctly.

To illustrate this concept, I am going to give an example. Let’s say you are considering a Getting Things Done technique and you are looking at tracks. Tracks is a Ruby on Rails web-based application, and if you are not familiar with this technology, it might take you some time to get all bits and pieces together so that you can see tracks login prompt in your browser. Instead, consider using this elastic server. It’s an image of a VMware virtual machine, which you can simply download and run in VMware Player. And there is your tracks application inside - it is already configured with a database and comes with all necessary web containers to run it.

I won’t be very surprised if more applications in the future will be offered for download in this format.

Categories: virtualization |