Looking through the daily RSS feeds I caught a post on http://www.virtualizationdaily.com about a new VMWare partner named JumpBox. Taking a minute to look through JumpBox's site I came across this statement in their FAQ

"Currently JumpBox supports Xen, Parallels and VMware - the three most popular virtualization platforms."

These kind of statements make me chuckle as they are funny on so many levels. Even though JumBox doesn't consider Microsoft to be a player in the Virtualization space, I wanted point out how easy it is to get these Virtual Appliances running inside of Virtual Server (or VPC).

Since the Virtual Appliance that JumpBox offers is built on Ubutu linux it has everything necessary to be compatible with the Virtual Server enviornment. All we have to do is get the drives converted into a format that VS can read.

What you need:

• The JumpBox vTiger Virtual Appliance: http://www.jumpbox.com/download-vtiger/
• A machine running Microsoft Virtual Server (I used Virtual Server 2005 R2)
• The vmToolkit Vmdk2Vhd Converter

Steps:

1. Expand the vTiger-0.5.tar file (WinRar or tar)
2. Run the Vmdk2Vhd converter on the three vmdk files (root.vmdk, swap.vmdk and var.vmdk) nameing the files to root.vhd, swap.vhd and var.vhd in a new folder of your choosing.
3. If your not already there, copy these three files to the machine running Virtual Server into a folder (make note of the folder)
4. Open the Virtual Server admin website and Create a new VM called vTiger in folder where you copied the three new .vhd files. Use 256mb of RAM and assign the first IDE harddrive to the root.vhd file.
5. Edit the configuration of the new VM and add the two more virtual harddrives swap.vhd to Primary Channel (1) and var.vhd to Secondary channel (1).
6. You should end up with something that looks like:

Thats all there is. Turn that VM and enjoy. Fact is there are quite a few of these types of Virtual Appliances out there that run just fine on platforms other than the one(s) they are advertised for. It's just a matter of getting them into acceptable formats for your selected virtual platform.

btw. The vTiger Virtual Appliance looks to be a great CRM solution. I'd highly recommend checking it out regardless of the platform you use.

Have Fun.