Creating Solaris 11 Vagrant boxes out of Unified Archives

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.

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Collecting CMDB information of Solaris and Linux systems

As mentioned in the previous post I am working on a tool which collects essential information of Linux and Solaris systems. The first release is finally public available on GitHub (collect_sysinfo.py).

Why have I written this tool? I needed it for my job and I found no other tool, which fulfilled our requirements. Additionally it was a nice opportunity to train my Python and RegEx skills.

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Map the guest ldom name to the operating system hostname

Keeping the documentation of the IT infrastructure by hand up to date is not really a lot of fun nor exciting, but still necessary. More automation in this area would be nice. After looking for an “Enterprise solution” for some months, I think there is no off-the-shelf solution which fulfills all our needs.

Therefore I started to develop a basic discovery script, which should discover all important information of our Solaris and Linux servers and feeds the info in our CMDB. Most of the stuff is straight forward and at best a opportunity to improve my Regex skills, but there are also some challenges which could be interesting for others.

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