The first Informix Developer Edition virtual appliance is now available to download from IBM.
We see a lot of interest in running IDS on virtual machines, and for the first time a self-contained pre-configured virtual machine image containing IDS 11.50 Developer Edition can be downloaded for free.

This appliance has many potential uses. It is a self-contained development environment containing Data Studio and various API's. It contains getting started guides for Informix programming. It can be used as a base environment for creating a training class. If you can reproduce problems in this environment you can be sure tech support have the same environment (though since this is a Developer Edition, there is no explicit support for this edition of the virtual appliance - it is for development, education and non-profit use). It has great potential for ISVs developing their own applications for re-sale in a self-contained virtual machine. Look for future announcements on editions of the appliance containing Enterprise and Workgroup editions of IDS. Put your own application on and drop it in a compute cloud for remote access.

Basics

The virtual machine contains a 32-bit SLES 10 SP2 operating system and the following software versions installed:
IBM Informix Dynamic Server 11.50.UC2DE
IBM Informix Client SDK 3.50.UC2
IBM Informix JDBC Driver 3.50.UC2
IBM Informix Spatial DataBlade 8.21.UC2
IBM Informix Web DataBlade 4.13.UC3
IBM Data Server Driver for JDBC/SQLJ
IBM Data Server Driver for ODBC/CLI
IBM OpenAdmin Tool for IDS 2.21
IBM Data Studio 1.1.2
All this software is pre-configured and ready to use.

Pre-Requisites
To run the VM image you need VMWare Player or Workstation installed on your machine. It also works with VMWare Fusion on MAC OS X, and VMWare Server. You need at least 1GB memory on your machine, 2GB will run much better. Up to 12GB free disk space is a good idea too.

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