We’ve made several enhancements to Oracle Solaris recently (including Automated Crash Dump Analysis, live storage migration of kernel zones, performance improvements in NFS and statd lock handling, updates to dozens of FOSS packages, etc.) and specifically to the “Oracle Solaris on OCI” experience in the last year, including VirtIO and Terraform support. We also enabled it to run in the OCI environment.

You can use Oracle Solaris in the Oracle Cloud for any compatible workload that would benefit from the benefits of a cloud environment, and would also benefit from the unique features and characteristics of Oracle Solaris 11. Those features include a native implementation of ZFS – arguably the most scalable, safest file system in the world. And Oracle Solaris has long been known for its rock-solid reliability and excellent scalability up to large amounts of CPU cores and RAM, characteristics that are as valuable in cloud computing as on-premises environments.

In addition to being the same Oracle Solaris that you run in your data center, you get the same support from Oracle at no additional charge beyond the OCI compute fee.

So how do you create an Oracle Solaris instance on OCI? Let us count the ways…

One, two, three, … eleven! Yes you read it right! There are at least eleven different ways to create an Oracle Solaris instance on OCI. Some of those use OCI-native tools, such as the console or the Python API. Others use separate tools with features connected to OCI, like Oracle VM VirtualBox, or Hashicorp’s Terraform IaC files. Oracle PCA and Oracle Solaris features round out the groups of methods.

We thought it would be useful to introduce our readers to all of these paths, one at a time. Our introductions to these methods will include a brief walk-through and, where appropriate, code that will be published at https://github.com/oracle/oraclesolaris-contrib/ .

Some of these methods require some understanding of OCI concepts, including listings, packages, package agreements, and more. We take a brief walk through them in our article “OCI Marketplace Components.”

Stay tuned for all of these blog entries!

Links to these articles: