Hello,
A workmate of mine told me that I should start using vmware server to be able to test several Oracle products. In this blog I will blog about my first steps on this path.
First of all I had to install the vmware software. Well that wasn't that difficult. Simply go to http://www.vmware.com/products/server/ register yourself and download the software.
Next step: install the software. This is not difficult as well. Just press [next] at lot of times. From the workmate I got an image with windows xp (and winzip!) on it. I started the image (double clicked the .vmx file) and pressed: Start this virtual machine. After a while the virtual machine was started. Then I faced my first problem. I wanted to install the Oracle SOA-suite. The day before I downloaded the software from otn.oracle.com. The zipfile was on my host machine (my laptop) but could not be accessed from the virtual machine. I could download it again of course but I thought there should be a better way. I had no internet connection as well at that moment. Installing a program like Filezilla is probably the smartest way of doing things like this, but no option at this moment because I had no internet connection.
Than I saw an option called CD-ROM on the VMWare Server Console. Double clicking on it gives you the option to select: [Use ISO image]. I pressed on the [browse] buttom after the option and I saw that I could browse to the file system on my laptop.
This was the solution. Using Nero I 'burned' an iso image from the dowloaded SOA-suite zip-file.
After that I started the vmware image with the iso file as cd-rom drive. This drive was available in the windows explorer on the virtual machine. I could unzip the SOA-suite zipfile and started installing the SOA Suite!

One of the most typical Dutch cultural exposings can be found on grandma's toilet. They're the Toilet-Tile-Wisdoms.
In the end of 2006 I've been asked to give a presentation on SOA in the Public Sector. There are many publications on SOA. They're all talking about (web)services, orchestration (BPEL) and maybe ESB. But at that presentation stated that I think SOA is really about one basic wisdom:
Tomorrow night I'll explain at our companies technite. But I'm happy to elaborate on this at your organization as well. Please contact us via www.darwin-it.nl.