Play on (safely)

Want to send a demo of your latest SOA stack to your users but don't want them to install a whole server just to look at what you're doing? You could give them a nice virtual machine image to try out, all loaded up with your code and a set of demo scripts. But do you know if they even have VMWare or Virtual PC installed? There's a quick answer in the shape of VMware Player:

VMware Player is free software that enables PC users to easily run any virtual machine on a Windows or Linux PC. VMware Player runs virtual machines created by VMware Workstation, GSX Server or ESX Server and also supports Microsoft virtual machines and Symantec LiveState Recovery disk formats.

It's a free download, so should make it easier to distribute demos as virtual machine images. So now all we need is a library of base images. VMware has thought of this too - so pop along to VMWare's Virtual Machine Center to find ready to run stacks from Novell, Redhat, BEA, IBM and Oracle - as well as VMWare's own Browser Appliance secure browsing tool. So, now for the big question, will Microsoft bite the bullet and do the same with Virtual PC? It looks like it has to.