Nice step-by-step writeup on installing Solaris 10 in a VM. Most of it also applies to Solaris Express.
A couple of things to add to my earlier notes on VMware/Solaris issues. The latest kernel patches for Solaris 10 (118844-19 and 118844-20) cause a panic on boot on some systems, including in a VMware virtual machine. Some limited details are available here. The workaround is to boot under the kernel debugger (kmdb) - type "b kmdb" when you get the "(b)oot or (i)nterpreter" prompt. You can make this persistent with "eeprom boot-file=kmdb" once you're booted (or by messing around with the boot configuration menus, but I don't recommend that for the easily frustrated).
The latest version of Solaris Express (build 27a, the one with ZFS) won't install in a VM if you use the graphical install and the default guest memory size (256MB). It hangs trying to load the X server and window system into memory. Either increase the memory (I suggest at least 512MB), or select the text install by hitting "4" when you get the question about install type. This should be fixed in a later build (to automatically fall back to the text install if there isn't enough room for the graphical install).
One thing to be carefull of is that Solaris Nevada build 28 and VMWare Workstation (both 5.0 and 5.5) really don't seem to get on with SCSI disk emulation in VMWare. VMWare crashes with in ASSERT C:/ob/bora-18463/bora/devices/scsi/scsiDrive.c:1310 bugNr 31073 when accessing the disks through format or zfs (fdisk seems to work OK)
This didn't happen (to me at least) in Nevada build 27a but I'm not sure what changed in build 28 that might trigger this (of course the OS should not crash VMWare anyway)
The workaround is to use IDE disks (though when using ZFS this is not as much fun as you can only play with a couple of IDE drives and don;t get to do serious mirroring or striping)
Cheers
Tim G
Posted by: Tim Graves | December 09, 2005 at 06:05 AM
>(of course the OS should not crash VMWare anyway)
yes, indeed!
Posted by: none | June 18, 2007 at 10:45 AM
Looking at your blog on
http://atucker.typepad.com/blog/2005/11/more_on_vmware_.html
I got a vmware crash after installing all the latest patches. 118855-36went ok, but then after sol10 installed all the other patches after that, I could not get vmware sol10 to start up again. I thought it was to do with my having the different directories on different vscsi disks. Since I am running the x86 version, I have not learned how to do the debugger from the prompt yet. Could you possibly provide some details? Thanks.
Posted by: Michael Love | August 17, 2007 at 11:00 PM