In the past I used several different sources to get VMware images, so here is a list of my sources with a short description on what’s the advantages of each source.

  • http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/

    • The ThoughtPolice in most cases seems to be the best source if you need a base image for a server based on various operating systems. It provides fairly small images for Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD, CentOS, Fedora.

  • http://virtualappliances.net/

    • Virtual Appliances provides ready to go images for Webservers based on LAMP, Apache Tomcat and many others. It’s the ideal solution if you need a quick preconfigured webserver. The images even seem to be ready for production use with only minor changes.

  • http://www.vmware.com/appliances/

    • The VMware appliance directory is where you need to look if you want an image of the latest Ubuntu or OpenSUSE desktop. I provides a search where you can search for VMware images.

I know there exist more sources but these three are the one I use the most often. If you don’t find the image you need there you can always ask your favorite search engine ;-)