Recently I designed and installed the computer system in my brother’s new dental office. Luckily, we came across Open Dental and decided it would be a good fit. Since the office is as paperless as possible it is important that the computer system be as reliable as possible. The Open Dental server is pretty basic needing just SAMBA and MySQL. Enter Linux. I researched and played around a bit and decided to jump on the Ubuntu bandwagon for this.

For various reasons, I decided that we should run this as a Virtual Machine using VMWare’s Virtual Server on top of some type of Windows Server platform. One major reason is my brother is already familar with Windows so I can easily walk him through basic troubleshooting steps.

So I decided that to keep with the theme of sharing I would offer up the Open Dental Virtual Appliance for anyone who may be intersted in trying it out.

To try this out you need to either download VMWare Player or VMWare Server and this ZIP file.

To login to the server use “opendental” for the username and password.

Please note that this is a very early release - I make no promises that it will not mess anything / everything up. I plan to test it much more (this image has hardly been tested); also I plan to throw some documentation together. Additionally, I will explain my backup strategy which will include a release of an Rsync virtual machine.