Dreamt of creating your Ensembl virtual Machine?

Now you can.
Over at their blog, they posted instructions on how to obtain a virtualbox image which you can use on any platform that virtualbox can be installed on (Win, Mac, Linux)

there are conversion tools to change virtualbox to vmware or even AMI
Should be seeing customised ensembl instances appearing more often


Will be giving this a whirl tomorrow! *rubs hands in glee*


http://asia.ensembl.org/info/data/virtual_machine.html

Ensembl Virtual Machine

Ensembl has available for download a virtual machine pre-packaged and pre-configured the latest ensembl-api. It is a quick and simple way to get started with Ensembl.

Overview of the process

The process is described in detail in the remainder of this document, with the main steps summarised as follows.

1. Obtain VirtualBox
2. Download and import the virtual machine
3. Create shared folders
4. Start and verify the Ensembl installation

UPDATE: the image uses the 64bit version of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. It runs pretty fast given one core and 4 Gb ram.

VM marketplace?

link
Wow that's a term I never imagined would exist

abstract:

The Nimbus Marketplace

The Nimbus marketplace is like the virtual machine marketplaces that are becoming popular but is specifically for scientific applications and other VMs that are useful for grid computing.
This is a place to find VMs and we also host many of them directly on this webserver. Each is accompanied by a populated workspace metadata file for quick deployment on resources running the Workspace Service.