tl/dr

How to provision an OmniOS CE r151054 instance on AWS EC2. Why?

Post by @kenichi@pdx.social

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Let’s get started…

OmniOS publishes AMIs, but I don’t see one for r151054; so, I’m going to try to build my own.

The current LTS is r151054, so I grabbed the vmdk file and followed the directions. Alas, AWS complains that the format of this file is invalid. At Claude’s suggestion, I converted the file to a raw image using qemu-img:

% qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O raw omnios-r151054.cloud.vmdk omnios-r151054.cloud.raw

Then, after uploading this much larger file to S3, I was able to import successfully:

{
  "Description": "omnios-r151054.cloud",
  "Format": "raw",
  "Url": "s3://bucket/omnios-r151054.cloud.raw"
}

% aws ec2 import-snapshot --disk-container file:///path/to/r151054.json
...
                "Status": "active",
...
% aws ec2 describe-import-snapshot-tasks
...
                "Status": "completed",
...

Now, back to the instructions. I created an ami.json from the template:

{
  "Architecture": "x86_64",
  "Description": "OmniOS illumos distribution",
  "EnaSupport": true,
  "Name": "OmniOS LTS r151054",
  "RootDeviceName": "/dev/xvda",
  "BlockDeviceMappings": [
    {
      "DeviceName": "/dev/xvda",
      "Ebs": {
        "SnapshotId": "snap-xxxyyyzzz"
      }
    }
  ],
  "VirtualizationType": "hvm",
  "BootMode": "uefi"
}

And used it to register an AMI:

% aws ec2 register-image --cli-input-json file:///path/to/ami.json
{
    "ImageId": "ami-aaabbbccc"
}

With AMI in hand, it is time to create an instance. I’m using OpenTofu:

resource "aws_instance" "omnios" {
  ami                         = "ami-aaabbbccc"
  associate_public_ip_address = true
  key_name                    = "key_name"
  instance_type               = "t3.xlarge"
  subnet_id                   = data.aws_subnet.subnet_a.id
  vpc_security_group_ids      = [aws_security_group.omnios.id]

  root_block_device {
    volume_size = 80
    encrypted   = true
    volume_type = "gp3"
  }
}

Once this applied, I checked the output with:

% aws ec2 get-console-output --instance-id i-1234567890 --latest | fx '.Output'

OmniOS r151054 Version omnios-r151054-6ad70ba62c 64-bit
Copyright (c) 2012-2017 OmniTI Computer Consulting, Inc.
Copyright (c) 2017-2025 OmniOS Community Edition (OmniOSce) Association.
WARNING: illegal PCI request: offset = 100, size = 4
WARNING: illegal PCI request: offset = 100, size = 4
NOTICE: Performing full ZFS device scan!
NOTICE: Original /devices path (/pci@0,0/pci1af4,2@4/blkdev@0,0:b) not available; ZFS is trying an alternate path (/pci@0,0/pci1d0f,8061@4/blkdev@1,0:b)
NOTICE: vdev_disk_open /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s1: update devid from '<none>' to 'id1,kdev@D1D0F-Amazon_Elastic_Block_Store______________-vol8675309-1/b'
NOTICE: vdev_disk_open /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s1: update devid from '<none>' to 'id1,kdev@D1D0F-Amazon_Elastic_Block_Store______________-vol8675309-1/b'
Loading smf(7) service descriptions: 1/1
Configuring devices.
Hostname: omnios
Applying initial boot settings...

*********************************************************
* cloud-init is configuring this system, please wait... *
*********************************************************

Alright! This is good news. Now to SSH in…

% ssh -i ~/.ssh/aws.pem.pub omnios@12.34.56.78
OmniOS r151054  omnios-r151054-6ad70ba62c       May 2025
omnios@ip-12-34-56-78:~$ uptime
18:30:15    up 8 min(s),  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.04, 0.03

Alright! We’ve deployed a modern (May ‘25) OmniOS CE instance on AWS and connected to it using SSH. We’ll continue with configuration in part II.