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
• IBM Informix Client SDK
• IBM Informix JDBC Driver
• IBM Informix Spatial DataBlade
• IBM Informix Web DataBlade
• IBM Data Server Driver for JDBC/SQLJ
• IBM Data Server Driver for ODBC/CLI
• IBM OpenAdmin Tool for IDS
• IBM Data Studio

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.

Installation

This version of the appliance is available for download as a self-extracting executable. To use on non-Windows platforms, rename the .exe as .rar and use an unrar utility to uncompress it.

Once it's uncompressed you can see more detailed documentation under the docsubdirectory. If VMWare is installed double click on the .vmx file. After starting the image you login as root with password root (remember to change this password later, this version does not force a change).

Download

Download the appliance here: IDS 11.5 Developer Edition SLES 10 SP2 virtual appliance demo (Be prepared to log in with your IBM ID or register.)
Make sure you have reviewed the included readme file

Read the Installation Instructions thoroughly to ensure proper deployment of the virtual appliance.

VMware TAP program ($14K+ of free software)
 
Free trial VMware software