So you’ve just installed Solaris because of the well-deserved praise regarding ZFS, SMF, predictive self healing, Zones and Dtrace. And then you said, “It runs vmware, right?”. Well, to my knowledge, no. Not quite. It does run xVM (a breed of “bare metal” type 1 hypervisor, which is very similar to xen.
But more interestingly, it also runs VirtualBox, a type 2 hypervisor which works pretty much like vmware server. This really is a great step to bringing virtualisation to the desktop for Solaris users
All you need to do is download the package, extract and and install it. From there on in, you can use the GUI to create a GuestOS and be running those apps you need! Crucially, it supports the following as Guest OS:
- Windows XP
- Linux (Ubuntu 7.10 works a treat)
- Solaris!
- …and many other OS, a list can he found here
A little tip to install XP in less than 10 mins:
Make a copy of the disc image as a .ISO file. Then copy that disc image to
/tmp
Be prepared for a hit on the RAM, as thats where /tmp is mounted! Then, before you start the Guest OS for the first time, configure it to mount the disc image from /tmp
Using your main memory as the install medium only leaves the processor and disc writes as your bottlenecks, making installs go really quick!!!
Of course, once your Guest OS is installed, be sure to delete the disc image you copied into /tmp
Happy hypervising! (its probably not a real word, but its great for telling people who aren’t into computing….”yeah, I’ve been hypervising for a few days now now….”.
your friend “…..hmmm, is that bad for your health?”
Tags: , solaris, virtualisation
Also pretty good when used on OS X as well - though network support is not at vmware levels yet.
So true. Ill be alot happier when the guest OS can get an IP add on the same subnet as the host machine!