50Micron.com

I got the notification a while back that VMWare ESX v3.5 is out.  I read everything I could about it to determine if it was going to work on my almost out-of-date hardware (This site as well as most of my infrastructure runs on a pair of Dell 2650 servers running ESX)

So very carefully, I shut-down the VM’s on the smaller server and boot from the 3.5 CD.

I have to say, as always, I’m impressed.  The VMWare upgrade went absolutely without incident, took about 35 minutes, and added a few new options that I think are just about the coolest thing.

One of the new features is the ability to import a virtual appliance directly from the VMWare Virtual Appliance Marketplace.

So the long and the short of it, let’s say you need to put a nagios box online in short order.

Go to http://www.vmware.com/appliance and search for “nagios”

Select from one of the 319 search results – find the solution that best fits your environment.

Download the appliance – then use the Import menu to import it directly to your server.

Simple as that.