It has been just a few weeks since Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. announced the availability of VM Depot – the community-driven catalog of open source virtual machine images. Since then, the community has been participating in this new and open approach by using and publishing virtual machine images through VM Depot. VM Depot launch partners, including Alt Linux, Basho, Bitnami and Hupstream have contributed a number of packages and the number of images published on the site has nearly tripled with new images being uploaded every day.

Today I would like to share with you that VM Depot is now integrated into the Windows Azure management portal to make using these images even easier. Users can now browse for open source stacks provided by the community – based on supported Linux distributions – and provision them as their personal images directly within the Windows Azure portal.

When you select the “Virtual Machines” tab, you will now see an option to “BROWSE VMDEPOT”:

After clicking “BROWSE VMDEPOT” you are presented with a full list of available images, with the ability to filter by OS distro:

Please join the community and help us make VM Depot the best place for open source communities to work together and build shared images for the cloud. You can also can get timely alerts on new images uploaded on Twitter @vmdepot. See you there!

Craig Kitterman
Sr. Product Manager
Windows Azure
@craigkitterman