I am using Vagrant with Virtualbox for many years to automate test environments on my notebook. I absolutely love it, it allows me to spin up Solaris and Linux virtual machines in any way I need it. If you also have a need for a very convenient and affordable LAB environment, give it a try.
There is an additional challenge if you want to use Solaris VMs. Because there are no prepared Solaris base images (aka boxes
), which you could just download from the web. I assume it is legally not allowed to redistribute Solaris.
Luckily Solaris has already a very powerful technology for handling OS images Unified Archives (UARs)
, which you likely use already for your OS deployment. In this post I will show how you can convert a Unified Archive hands-free in approximately 10 minutes into a Vagrant box
.