VirtualBox in an OpenSolaris zone?

Discussions related to using VirtualBox on Solaris hosts.
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bsder
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Joined: 31. May 2008, 14:35

VirtualBox in an OpenSolaris zone?

Post by bsder »

A couple people have asked this question but gotten no response. The User's Guide seems to indicate that this is possible, but nobody seems to have an answer.

So, how about an answer this round even if it's negative? Is it possible to run VirtualBox in an OpenSolaris 2008.5 zone?

Thanks.
Phobos
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Post by Phobos »

pete_l
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Post by pete_l »

I asked the question that phobos refers to (and was kind enough to provide a reply for). The cited article basically says "yes, it's possible - we've done it". However it provides no actionable information, although this declaration does contradict the post which said it had to run in the global zone.

I spent a day reasearching and then messing around with containers, zones and pools. I got almost nowhere - probably due to my own unfamiliarity with the jargon. I think I configured a pool - but on my 1-processor box it failed to initialise. I later found a little article which said that pools need at least two processors, so at least I learned something.

As it turns out, it seems that at best a zone will only control CPU usage. It will do nothing to prevent a resource intensive process or VM from performing extreme amounts of disk I-O or network I-O to the detriment of other resource-sharers and is therefore not a solution to my problem. I have therefore concluded that it's not possible to fully contain a VM. The possibility of this was the only reason I persued a Solaris implementation of VB.I have since torn-down the evaluation system and reported that Solaris is either not capable of performing this management task, or that the solution is so obscure that no-one has published a straighforward way of acheiving it. When I find some time, I am thinking about running VB under Linux and will build a Solaris guest where I can learn more about containers etc. in an environment where my mistakes can easily be rolled back to an earlier snapshot.
Phobos
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Post by Phobos »

maybe you could use some of this information on containers, opensolaris and virtualbox http://blogs.sun.com/jsavit/entry/zones ... ecd_inside to help you
pete_l
Posts: 62
Joined: 23. May 2008, 15:10

Post by pete_l »

Yes, that looks like some pretty good info. ATM I have some higher priorities but maybe in a few weeks I'll get a chance to revisit this area.
I've bookmarked it for future reference, thanks

Pete
kebabbert
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Re: VirtualBox in an OpenSolaris zone?

Post by kebabbert »

It is doable. Read here for more information
http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa ... 5&tstart=0

I am setting up zones and Virtualbox inside each zone. Right now. Will finish the thread when I get everything working.
sej7278
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Re: VirtualBox in an OpenSolaris zone?

Post by sej7278 »

not meaning to sound rude, but opensolaris is well and truly dead, so isn't this a waste of effort?

surely you should just be using regular solaris 10 x86_64 or 11 express beta (whatever they call it today)?
kebabbert
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Re: VirtualBox in an OpenSolaris zone?

Post by kebabbert »

So what if OpenSolaris is dead?

There have been many preview distros of Solaris 11 source code. One of the first distros was called "Solaris Express CE". Then it got killed. OpenSolaris is another preview distro of Solaris 11 source code. Then it got killed, and "Solaris 11 Express" is the latest preview. They have all been previews with different names, of the same Solaris 11 source code. OpenSolaris was build 134 of Solaris 11 source code. Solaris 11 Express is build 151a of Solaris 11 source code. It is the same Solaris 11 source code, nothing has changed except the name and the license.

OpenSolaris has been renamed to Solaris 11 Express. They are the same distro.

In other words, what applies to OpenSolaris also applies to Solaris 11 Express, and therefore this post is interesting for Solaris 11 Express users.
ch.eick
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Re: VirtualBox in an OpenSolaris zone?

Post by ch.eick »

Dear all,
hopefully I'm not to late, to answer this question. On 10.12.2010 I held an presentation regarding "VirtualBox in
an OpenSolaris Zone" on our OpenSolaris User Group Frankfurt.
What I did in my demo was to install a OpenSolaris b150 (Oracle 11 Express) with two Zones. VirtualBox has to be
installed in the global-zone, because of the device integration. By sharing the installation path of Virtualbox and
although the VirtualBox devices in each zone you can start and use VirtualBox in the zone.
I used iscsi devices to share storage between VirtualBox, to be able to boot VMs in both zones (only one iscsi at one time).
My zones are clones of an image_zone using zfs and also my guest installations are clones of an image with zfs compression.
It was possible to boot for example VM_1 on zone_1 and teleport it to zone_2 (same VM configuration in VirtualBox!).

Conclusion:
It is possible to have VirtualBox running in a zone.
It is not answered to use special devices in a zone, that means I didn't use usb in a zone.
I also didn't use cpu capping, because there are no resources to cap :-) (Toshiba Tecra M10; 2 cpu and 4Gb Ram)
There is a German presentation, describing all this ;-)
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