VMware, Inc., the global leader in software for industry–standard virtualized desktops and servers, today announced the winners of the Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge at LinuxWorld 2006. The Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge began February 27, 2006 and was designed to foster continued innovation in developing virtual appliances, which are pre-built, pre-configured and ready-to-run software applications packaged with the operating system into virtual machines.

Check it out. Some cool toys there. Great idea from VMWare.

this one sounds interesting, but I can't exactly figure out what it does

All I can make out is that you boot up a VM which has a server component on it that gets loaded, then you boot a client PC up on a seperate ISO image and it dumps an image of the hard drive from the client -> server.

Sounds like a long and cumbersome way to boot from a Live CD, mount a remote share and use dd -or- pay for Ghost.