We’re pleased to announce that Oracle Solaris 11.4 images are now available in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Marketplace!  This means that customers of OCI IaaS can run Solaris workloads in the cloud with full support from Oracle, which is included in your IaaS subscription.  There are two images, one for bare metal and another for virtual machines, and they’re available in all OCI regions.

Using the Solaris images is very simple.  In the OCI console, select the Marketplace item in the OCI console main menu.  In the All Applications directory, you can use filters to help find the Oracle Solaris listings, as in this screenshot:

 

Selecting one of the Solaris items will bring you to its listing screen:

From the listing page, you can acknowledge the terms & conditions and select the compartment for deployment.  Clicking Launch Instance will take you to the Create Compute Instance page:

I’ve not shown the remainder of the create instance page here, but you’ll need to select the shape, provide an ssh key, and select the virtual network to which the instance will be connected.  Once the instance is launched, you’ll be able to ssh in as the opc user within a couple of minutes.  That’s all it takes to get started with Oracle Solaris in OCI!  You’ll likely also want to review my prior blogs on using Solaris in OCI to make best use of the cloud:

The images come with a relatively minimal set of packages, defined by the solaris-cloud-guest group package, so most likely you’ll need to add to them to run your applications; just use the pkg command to install what you need.  In particular, you may wish to add the system/locale package in order to obtain UTF-8 locales for the major languages supported by Solaris.  You’ll also likely also want to update to the current Support Repository Update (SRU), just follow the standard instructions for accessing the Oracle Solaris support repository. We plan to update these images on a regular basis to include recent SRUs, and welcome both questions and feedback on the image content.