virtual appliances

Long-awaited Solaris Enterprise System virtual appliance now available

First they open source Java, and now we get a Solaris 10 + Sun Enterprise System virtual machine. Somebody at Sun is definitely not getting coal in their stocking this year. VMware’s Andy Tucker writes:

I’ve noted previously that one of the non-Sun distros of OpenSolaris (Nexenta) is available in a VM.  Now, Sun has now quietly added the Solaris Enterprise System Virtual Machine 1.0
to the Sun Download Center (as a free download).  This is Solaris 10
Update 1, plus the Studio 11 compilers, plus all the Java Enterprise
System software – app server, web server, directory server, etc. – all
in a VMware virtual machine.  No OS or application install, just
download and untar, fire up VMware Player/Server/Workstation (take your
pick), and power the VM on.

Treat this as a 1.0, at least as far as fit-and-finish inside a virtual machine is concerned. Our alliances and appliances teams are working with Sun to install VMware Tools and implement other virtual appliance best practices. Most tweaks you can do yourself once you download it. This will be listed within our Virtual Appliances Marketplace very soon.