We have two new beta JumpBoxes available in the Proving Grounds:

	Nagios is a network monitoring system that watches your network and notifies you of any problems. The JumpBox makes it really easy to get it running. Due to the nature of Nagios, configuration still requires additional work, but the JumpBox gives you a good jump start on the process.
	MySQL is the worlds most popular Open Source database. It's a core component of many systems and the JumpBox for MySQL provides a very quick way to get a MySQL instance complete with PHPMyAdmin running.

Both are based on the JumpBox platform 1.1 Beta and include all the great new enhancements described here.

The other exciting news is that we've opened the Proving Grounds up to the public. You'll notice there's now a link at the upper right corner of this site which takes you to our testing community. The Proving Grounds is the place where we make pre-release JumpBoxes available for testing before moving them to production status. We've got a ton of interesting candidates in the pipeline so be sure to check out the Proving Grounds for the latest and greatest.

We have some exciting news today- you can now get a license for every JumpBox currently in our Open Source collection for just $199.99. With twenty applications in the collection today, this is a toolkit of incredible value. But this is also a gift that keeps on giving. JumpBox Open entitles you to a license for every new JumpBox we add to the collection over the next year. And we're adding some great applications soon: Nagios, Moodle, Redmine, MySQL and a Ruby on Rails deployment JumpBox are all in the pipeline.

Think of it like this: if your time is worth $50/hr, a single JumpBox that saves you four hours today pays for the entire subscription. Then you have (Jeff Spicoli voice) "an ultimate set of tools" for the next year. Have a particular application you'd like to see added? Suggest it in the forums or via our contact form. We're committed to making great Open Source applications more accessible and the debut of JumpBox Open should be a great step towards that goal. Keep in mind that the $199.99 pricing is introductory though so take advantage of it while it lasts.

If you missed the webinar we did with Virtual Iron earlier this week, there's an archived version available here. It's a 30min webex presentation with the first half explaining the virtualization piece (specifically Virtual Iron in this case) and the second half talking about the JumpBox piece with a full walk-through of the process setting up the Alfresco JumpBox start to finish. Big thanks to Chris Barclay and the folks at Virtual Iron for inviting us to participate.

We have our first graduates of the Proving Grounds:

• Alfresco CMS
• OTRS Trouble Ticket System
• Mantis Bug Tracker
• Bugzilla

are all now battle-tested and available for production use and purchase. Thanks to all the Proving Grounds members who submitted feedback and helped us work out the kinks in these apps.

We also have seven new applications that just entered the Proving Grounds:

• phpBB discussion forums
• Moodle school course management system
• Cacti RRD graphing package
• MoinMoin wiki software
• TikiWiki content management system
• PmWiki wiki software
• Redmine project management software

We've made some of the pre-release apps available to the public for download but to get beta keys to unlock the pre-release apps you'll need to belong to the Proving Grounds. And there will always be a few apps that we keep exclusive to PG members.

We're also running a promotion right now - all JumpBox Basic Registrations are $24.99 until noon MST on December 14th, so if you were on the fence about registering yours, now's the time.

Lastly, we're doing a webinar with the folks from Virtual Iron in an hour (11am PST today). The presentation will be captured and available online afterwards but if you'd like to participate and ask questions, tune in here.

Here's a video that may be of interest for anyone using the JumpBox for Trac. This is a presentation I did on Tuesday night for the San Diego Java User Group. We talk about what contributes to effective project management, the qualities of a good proj mgmt tool and then use Trac in a real scenario to demonstrate how it works. Big thanks to Paul Webber of the SDJUG for allowing me to speak to his group.

We're on the homepage of Spigit today featured as their "launch of the day." Spigit is a veritable "fantasy league for startup ideas" and a neat way to test the waters for the general acceptance and interest around an idea. Special thanks to Joe for featuring us.

The folks over at Office Snapshots just did a piece on us.

We’ve seen a common trend of requests in the support forums for better documentation or even mini-tutorials on how to accomplish specific tasks in setting up and working with your JumpBox. We just published a series of simple screenshot-based tutorials for the most commonly-performed administrative tasks. You can access these here or from any page on the site via the “Tutorials” link in the footer. These pages have comments enabled so you can elaborate on specific questions on each.

Enjoy!

As of today our cozy four-person team has a new member. Introducing Bruce (far right):

Bruce’s trading card reads something like:

Bruce - Linux Applications Specialist: Bruce hails from the other side of the pond originally from a rural area outside of Birmingham, England. He brings the UK perspective to our previously all-Yankee team. Like Austin, Bruce comes to us from the sister project to Google Mars at ASU where he was responsible for managing the large linux clusters that process satellite data and map the moon. Bruce is also studying part-time to get his degree in Physics. When he’s not managing linux servers or crunching Physics equations, Bruce can be found riding his motorcycle and fixing up his recently-purchased condominium in Tempe.

Bruce will be primarily focused on helping us build out the library of Open Source applications for JumpBox and we’re extremely excited to have him on board. Welcome Bruce!

Kimbro and Sean will be attending the rPath leadership summit on virtual appliances April 3-4th in Dallas, TX. It should be an important event - small (25 ppl) but dense with some of the brightest minds in this space and all of the major players will be represented. We’ll ammend this post with the takeaways from that event that we can share. If you’re a Dallas resident, come join us for a cocktail in the hotel bar of the Omni after the days’ events.

UPDATE: As promised, here’s a recap of some thoughts on the Virtual Appliances Leadership Summit last week in Dallas.

As expected it was a small but high-power cast of some very influential people in the industry- program managers and CTO’s from the major hardware vendors and virtualization players. There were two tracks the first day and Kimbro and I split up to get best coverage. I lucked out with the one I attended while it sounded like Kimbro’s group got side-tracked by discussions of grid computing and peripheral issues to building virtual appliancs. The takeaways I had from my group:

1. Validation. Being in Phoenix we’re somewhat isolated from the lively technology ecosystem that is Silicon Valley. But engaging in discussion with these folks and having our company name used in the same breath as a 38-person, VC-funded company was major validation that we’re doing something right as a 4-person shop in the desert ;-)
2. Differentiation. Although we have a technology that’s similar to rPath’s in the sense that it allows us to deploy linux applications as virtual appliances, we’re serving different roles in different markets. rPath makes the toolset to allow software vendors to transform their apps into appliances- they don’t actually build appliances. JumpBox developed its own toolset but doesn’t sell it- we build appliances. rPath is focused fairly exclusively on the enterprise space while we’re tackling small/medium business - each has an entirely different set of problems to solve. Which segways to the third takeaway…
3. Distraction. The topics that were primarily discussed in my tracks were focused around the enterprise bag of challenges. This is understandable since rPath was the event host but from our perspective these concerns are secondary to improving usability and awareness of virtual appliances. Issues like backups in an enterprise setting, broadcasting resource requirements and doing dynamic resource allocation for the appliances: while these concerns are important in the enterprise setting, they’re moot points for us until wide-spread use. Our focus right now is on building awareness, building out the library of apps and solving issues to improve the adoption of VA’s for small/med business.

The second day the group stayed together and we heard summaries of the previous day’s discussions and an analyst from IDC explain why he thought the VA market is going to boom over the next few years. None of the charts or research he presented was public at this point but expect to see some compelling statistics come from the analyst world soon. The presenter that did the final talk of the day was from the grid computing group and while they were extremely nice people, we thought their presence derailed a lot of the discussion. Using VA’s for a grid computing scenario is interesting but such a specialized instance whose relevance is limited to academics and highly-niche industries, we thought it was a bit strange to close with this topic for a wrap-up.

All in all it was a great event with solid people in attendance and we were extremely priviledged to attend. rPath stepped it up and showed themself to be a leader in this space by gathering this group and fronting for all the food and materials. Great choice of venue, great food. We look forward to keeping in touch with the folks we met there.

-sean