One drawback with the Google Search Appliance (GSA) has been that you cannot test it before you buy it. You could go to a Google Partner and ask them to index your content but that only works well with  public content. If it’s content behind your firewall it gets worse and you most probably have to buy your own GSA just to try it out.

With the Virtual Google Search Appliance (VGSA) you can now try all the GSA functionality before buying it. The VGSA is simply a VMWare image of the GSA software. Simply install it on a regular server, fire up VMWare and you’re good to go! All functionality of the real deal is available, including the connector framework. The only limitation is the index limit of 50,000 documents.

Our customers often wants to do a PoC or Pilot before investing in an enterprise search solution. The VGSA is ideal for this since it’s easy and cheap to get up and running. It’s also great for us partners that we now can have multiple installations to experiment with without buying a lot of hardware.

Read more about the VGSA here!