VMware and OpenSolaris

As a former Solaris engineer, I'm interested in helping people use Solaris and OpenSolaris with VMware.  VMware and Sun have announced that full support for Solaris will be added in future versions of VMware products.  In the meantime, the existing products can be made to work, but there are a few issues.  Here's some of the ones I know of (with workarounds).  Note: these aren't official recommendations from VMware (except where I've linked to vmware.com docs); they've worked for me, but your mileage may vary.

There are a couple of issues with virtual LSI Logic SCSI disks. Solaris 8 and 9 (GA) didn't come with a driver for the LSI Logic disk; if you try to install you'll get an error message saying something about "divide by zero error".  The fix is to either download the driver from the LSI website and install it as an ITU (details available with the driver), or upgrade to a recent update of Solaris 9 (which includes the driver) or to Solaris 10 or later.  More details are available here.

In addition, the LSI (actually "mpt") driver in versions of Solaris later than Solaris 10 (i.e., Solaris Express or OpenSolaris) contains some changes that don't work with Workstation 5.0.  You can either install on a virtual IDE drive (select the "custom" option when creating the VM), or use the beta of Workstation 5.5 (or the new VMware Player) instead. Setting up the X server can be a bit of a challenge.

The Xsun server available in Solaris 9 is actually pretty straightforward: kdmconfig will autoselect the VMware driver and a 1024x768 screen.  To change the screen size, run kdmconfig (as root) and pick a new size.  The Xorg server used by default in Solaris 10 and later is a bit more of a problem - it comes up OK, but the default screen size is pretty small (800x600). To change that, you can either switch back to the Xsun server by running kdmconfig, or run /usr/X11/bin/xorgconfig to reconfigure the Xorg server.  Some tips from other folks who have gone the xorgconfig route are available here and here.

Comments

[Claire Giordano]

Welcome back to the blogosphere, Andy. w00t!

[Tarry Singh]

Hey Andy,

I haven't been much of a solaris fan but lately I'm getting the itch to get on with opensolaris and VMware.

So what's my inspiration?

I'd love to demonstrate/run Oracle 10gR2 RAC on two opensolaris OS's. What better way to say hello to this openSolaris, no?

PS: Keep it up ;)

Cheers

Tarry