Sources for free virtual machine software

Here are a few sources of free virtual machine software. Some of these are sources of true virtual appliances and some are just virtual machines with an OS pre-installed.

• Xen-get - Free virtual machine images for Xen. http://xen-get.org/. Most of the major free Linux distributions are available pre-installed. These are actually just file system images, but when used with Xen the function is the same as a full virtual machine image.
• Jailtime - More Free virtual machine images for Xen. http://jailtime.org. This site is pretty similar to Xen-get and like Xen-get these are file system images.
• OSZoo - Free virtual machine images for Qemu. http://www.oszoo.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page. Again the typical set of Linux and other open source OS VM images. The interesting thing about this site is that if you use Q for OS X you can download images directly from the application. It’s also possible to convert these images for use with Parallels and VMWare and to do the same with Xen when running on hardware that supports the hvmloader [1] to boot an unmodified operating system.
• VMWare Appliance Directory - Lot’s virtual appliances and virtual machine images for VMWare. http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/. This is the big list of virtual appliances for VMWare. There’s somewhere around 170 appliances online now, some of which are really nice. With a little work most of these can also be converted to run under Parallels or Xen(on an hvm enabled platform).
• rPath rBuilder Online - An online tool for building open source appliances. http://www.rpath.com/rbuilder/. Some of these are available through the VMWare directory, but there are other projects there that aren’t currently listed. From the rBuilder site you can also sometimes find images that can be used directly in Parallels and Xen.
• Virtualappliances.net - This company builds some of the best examples of virtual appliances currently available. They’re small and very focused. http://virtualappliances.net/. They currently have appliances for MySQL, PostgreSQL, Tomcat and a simple web server appliance. All appliances are available for VMWare and Xen (no hvm support required).