Kate Keahey writes on workspace-announce:

We are happy to announce the release TP 1.2.3 of the Workspace Service. The new release adds features enabling partition management for VMs scheduled to be deployed: partitions can be mounted on deployment and blank partitions of a required size can be automatically generated. In addition, we added HTTP transfer adapter for staging, improved scheduling criteria, and added a User Quickstart guide.

For a detailed changelog, see the TP 1.2.3 documentation:
http://workspace.globus.org/vm/TP1.2.3/index.html

You can download the new release from:
http://workspace.globus.org/downloads/index.html

Accompanying this release is a lot of documentation work including a new User Quickstart, Features and Roadmaps pages, the Workspace Marketplace, and sitewide updates.

One of the new features, the HTTP transfer adapter, allows for the service to trigger an HTTP GET on a configured image repository node on the cluster. As with any of the staging mechanisms, from there the file can be propagated to one or many hypervisor pool nodes.

The adapter includes configurations that allow for (a) checksum verification and (b) the ability to auto-sense gzip files (which are common for VMs online) and decompress them after the transfer.

In short, this adapter allows a workspace’s staging request to seamlessly include VMs from online VM appliance marketplaces such as rBuilder (which is much more than a repository of VM images if you have not checked that out yet).