Rodney Campbell's Blog

In my last post I had installed SXCE Build 84 on my Sun Ultra 24 workstation in the hopes that I could get xVM working – however build 84 still contained the 3.0.4 Xen codebase.

Last night I installed SXCE Build 85 and behold it includes the 3.1.2 Xen codebase and better still I could now boot the xVM kernel – looks like it is now time to play with virt-manager.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing however as I had some issues doing the initial install. When using my normal settings in the GUI/wizard install of OpenSolaris the installation would fail early on. The error logs weren’t exactly helpful, however it did mention the inability to create my user account. I restarted the install a few times and changed various answers during the wizard process and eventually the install completed successfully. I’m not exactly which change fixed the installer however I believe that in the last attempt in the screen where you select the properties of your user account I made sure that my Username (not loginname) contained no spaces and for my Locale I didn’t choose my normal selection (of English(Australian)) but rather used the default of English(US).

Something I did notice was that when running the xVM kernel I could not properly install the 64bit version of VirtualBox as usual – it would install but it couldn’t load the kernel module and whilst the VirtualBox client software would start up you couldn’t run the VM (no kernel module running). I’d be interested if anyone knows if and how you can run the xVM kernel AND VirtualBox at the same time.

As a starting point for those of you interested in taking a look at xVM I found the following links to be handy introductions:

The Sun System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System – especially part IV which has the chapters on xVM (the PDF version is also available).

A Comprehensive Overview of Sun xVM outlines Sun VM, including products, installation instructions, and using Windows XP on Sun xVM. The article defines Sun xVM as a family of technologies that addresses both desktop and server virtualization, leveraging work from open source communities like Xen that is being built on proven Sun technology.

The blogger explains his choice of Sun xVM over VMware and Linux+Xen and he also discusses the two types of virtual machine: Hardware Virtual Machine and Para Virtual Machine. He also outlines the starting of domainU configuration and its cloning, noting that one can clone domU in as little as one minute. He shows as well how to set up cifs server if one is running Windows domU and the use of virt-manager as a GUI interface to manage Sun xVM.

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