Catalina Released...and Live on Orka!

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.