I run a hosting company based in the UK. Recently someone approached me looking at hosting the ESVA VMWare appliance, and it got me thinking that VMWare appliance hosting is possibly a revenue generator (for several people, as i will also run an affiliate system).

Is this something that people would take up do you think?

(just thought i'd mention that i'm not after free advertising etc - thats why i've not mentioned the name of my company)

Leigh

There is work that needs to be done on the JumpBox to make the hosting experience as painless as possible. So far, there is no place you can take a JumpBox and conveniently host it. Even bringing it to the VMware hosting people mentioned elsewhere might not work as well as one hopes, although I would be glad to hear people's experiences. I have appreciated the feedback so far.

We are working on solving the hosting issue. In the mean time, there are MANY DIY options. Many of the modern linux distributions incorporate Xen and KVM. Sometimes getting a JumpBox to boot under these environments can be a chore due to the host OS differences. I am not sure about license restrictions in the desktop Virtualization Solutions (Vmware Server, Player, Parallels) but it would is technically possible to host using those. Many different DIY virtualization options can be made to work.

I would suggest keeping an eye on the JumpBox blog for announcements on this topic. The timeframe is likely to be months rather than weeks though. So I don't want to get anyone's hopes up.

Austin

there are two options for hosting JumpBox VMs software appliances

HOSTED
1) AMAZON EC2 Xen Compute Cloud

DIY
2) Oracle Xen VM Server and Manager

regards
clive

www.osde.info

Yes on both counts, it is a painfully obvious missing piece of the puzzle. We will be doing one or the other in the near future. Sorry we can't easily accommodate your need now.

Austin

This seems like an easy opportunity for you to partner with someone, or an easy business line for you to go into.

Hi,
At this point, there aren't any drop-in solutions for hosting. There are a few places that do VMWare ESX hosting but that is targeted towards the upper end of the hosting market. There are a few people who do Xen hosting as well but at this point, no one who will take a configured JumpBox and deploy it. We are working on solving that problem.

That leaves Do-It-Yourself solutions. Getting a leased Linux machine and installing your virtualization software on it is the route we have taken, but that can be a bigger time investment than most people want.

Austin