Catalina Released...and Live on Orka!
Catalina was officially released today, and within a matter of hours, the Orka team had made a Catalina ISO available to our customers. We encourage all of our current Orka customers to pull the new ISO and give Catalina a try.
Catalina was officially released today, and within an hour of becoming aware that the OS was live in its official stable state, the Orka team had:
- Downloaded the .dmg
- Converted to an ISO
- Uploaded to Orka's shared ISO storage
- Loaded into a VM
- Fully booted
- Saved and ran deployment tests to validate stability
The image created in Orka is stable, and re-deployable as any CI/CD professional would expect, showing a classic desktop screen:
The old Catalina Beta ISO in the shared storage has been renamed to Catalina-Beta.iso. MacStadium maintains a repo of ISOs for use with the Orka offering, so customers have an easy method of building images from base as if it was a clean install.
Officially, there is no SLA on when new macOS versions will be available on Orka. However, we're proud that Catalina was ready on the same business day - the ISO was made available about 1 PM EDT and the process was complete by 3 PM EDT, so within about two hours from launch.
We encourage all of our current Orka customers to pull the new ISO and give the released Catalina a try. For those that wish to try Orka, please feel free to reach out.
Note: Catalina is also available for our vSphere customers. There is a bit more do-it-yourself involved, and customers must be on vSphere 6.7u3. Read our upgrade instructions here.