How are you using Virgo?

Following on from the nice write-up about the use of Virgo by Croatian Telecom, I'd like to encourage others who have not already done so to provide a brief summary of how they are using Virgo. If you can include a company or project name, so much the better. Numbers of servers, users, and applications are helpful if you have them to hand as are peak traffic rates. A frank summary of the pro's and con's of Virgo and OSGi will help others who are assessing the technology. Also, mentioning some of the specific 3rd party components you are successfully using gives others an idea whether what they'd like to do is feasible.

I can link helpful write-ups which include company or project names from the "Virgo Powered" list of the Virgo home page, so you get some free marketing out of this. If you can place your write-up on a personal or company blog, I can link to that too, thus helping to increase your inbound links and traffic.

This is a great, low-cost way to contribute something back to the Virgo community, even if you never answer a forum thread, raise a bug, or send in a patch. Please take a few minutes to do a write-up if you feel you can.

Virgo Ships in VMware vSphere 5.1

Apart from all those v's, what do VMware vSphere and Virgo have in common? Well you won't be surprised to learn that VMware, as well as contributing to the Virgo project, have shipped Virgo as part of their flagship virtualisation product vSphere 5.1. Virgo provides the web server for the vSphere Web Client.

VMware chose Virgo in order to make the Web Client UI extensible. Users can write plugins defining Web Client extension points and containing WAR files, OSGi bundles and extension point configurations in order to supply Adobe Flex UI components and custom data services used by the UI.

Plugins are registered with a vCenter Server and are automatically deployed to Virgo instances which connect to the vCenter Server. The result is a customisable UI and a customisable data layer that can serve up data either from the VMware Inventory Service or some other remote data source.

Users can develop WAR files and OSGi bundles using the Virgo IDE tooling and VMware provides the configured Virgo server (known as Serenity), an SDK for developing extensions, and full documentation. See the SDK download page for these.

Full documentation is provided in the vSphere Web Client Extensions Programming Guide.