Solaris 11 (11/11 Final) Super Slow !

[taltalon]

Guys,
Running Windows 7 32bit, trying the Solaris 11/11 Final Release in a VB.
Solaris 11/11 is 64bit only so i enabled it as a Solaris 10 update 9/10 and later 64bit.

its so painfully slow - booting, shutting down and ofcouse you cannot install the VB additions.
Is it suppose to be that slow because of the 64bit to 32bit virtulizaiton?

Solaris 11 Express works fine but it native i386.

any ideas?
tal

[jonesy16]

I can't even get Solaris 11 to install. It aborts during the installation process (at least from the text installer 64-bit CD image).

[Perryg]

@taltalon,
We would need to see the guests log file (as an attachment) to know what is happening.
But there is an overhead to running a 64 bit guest with a 32 bit host and that might be causing an issue.

Another thing you can do is when the boot splash screen comes up, escape out of the splash screen and see if you are receiving an unknown host error. This causes a rather log wait when booting. (if you are I can probably give you a fix)

@jonesy16,
Have you tried the live CD install? The text mode really doesn't like to be installed in a virtual environment (at least from what I see).

Note: the install seems to take a while, which seems normal to me with Solaris as guest. But once it is installed and working the boot speed and operation seems fairly good.

[taltalon]

I tried the Live CD - and got it installed - it just takes ages with some network timeouts for some services.
VB additions wont install on this release.

i will try to get you logs.

[Ramshankar]

Solaris 11 requires at least 1536 MiB of RAM to install. I'd recommend using 2 GiB with sufficiently enough memory for the host OS as well. Many of the totally bizarre guest hangs during install etc., are due to insufficient memory. In other words such insufficient memory to the the Solaris 11 guest isn't a VirtualBox problem but an S11 issue.

[arealone]

Here we go....

Dear Oracle Corp!

My PC is 2 month old, it has 16GB of RAM and 6 physical cores.
Primary OS is Windows 7 64bit.
Solaris 11 is unusable as a guest OS in Vbox 4.1.6.
I dedicated 8GB of RAM and 4 cores to this VM and it does not help.
Yes, I can install Solaris 11 but it does not work fluently.
It can stop for 3-5 minutes and them continue to go.
It works always like that. Therefore it's a technical issue which has to be solved.

P.S. All other guests (Win XP, Solaris 10, OpenSolaris b134, Win 2008R2) work fine.

[Martin]

Did you try it with 4GB RAM and only one or two virtual CPUs?

[Ramshankar]

Here we go....

Dear Oracle Corp!

My PC is 2 month old, it has 16GB of RAM and 6 physical cores.
Primary OS is Windows 7 64bit.
Solaris 11 is unusable as a guest OS in Vbox 4.1.6.
I dedicated 8GB of RAM and 4 cores to this VM and it does not help.
Yes, I can install Solaris 11 but it does not work fluently.
It can stop for 3-5 minutes and them continue to go.
It works always like that. Therefore it's a technical issue which has to be solved.

P.S. All other guests (Win XP, Solaris 10, OpenSolaris b134, Win 2008R2) work fine.

"does not work fluently" and "stop for 3-5 minutes" isn't sufficient information we can work with. We would, at the very least, require the VBox.log for the VM in question along with a description of what you're doing within the VM to try and reproduce this issue. Also, adding more vCPUs to a VM doesn't always mean it runs faster. There is no direct 1:1 mapping and pindown of vCPU threads to host CPU threads among a host of other things that affect SMP VMs.

[ch.eick]

Hi all,

I start getting the same problem.

AMD Phenom x6 cpu
Oracle Solaris 11 b150
VirtualBox 4.1.0
Guest should be Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 downloaded 14.12.2011 live CD x86

Some more Information:

My Bootdisk is an ISCSI device located in the rpool with a size of 20G
It's attached to VirtualBox as "LUN 30".
VirtualBox is running in the GlobalZone and at testing time there were no other guests.

The Installation stopped at 5% for a "longer time" and jumps to 88% after "some minutes".
Okay, that's not an exact Information.

If you have a look to the CPU utilization in the guest system you can see a "sine curve",
but the Installation is still not going forward.

There is no real IO on the underlaying zpool/zfs.


Final check to the VM.....it is already hanging at 88% if installation. I decide to
switch the VM to PowerOff

[tullio]

I have tried to Install Solaris 11 on my Linux host with an Opteron 1210 and failed with an error message, because my CPU was not seen as 64 bit, as it is in fact. I was running a Solaris Express 32 bit. Then I downloaded from Oracle a Virtual Machine including Solaris 11 64 bit and installed it on my Virtual Box as an Imported Appliance and the installation worked OK.

[mzaun]

To confirm: guest Solaris 11 is factors slower than OpenSolaris (32 and 64 bit) or Solaris Express, or Linux, or Windows.
Almost unusable, takes ~5 minutes or so to start up and minutes to shutdown, seconds just for reaction on mouse clicks.
Also: clipboard exchange (copy&paste) between host and guest not working most of the time.

Host: MacBook Pro, 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3, MacOS X, Snow Leopard 10.6.8
Guest: OS Type=Solaris 10 and later (64bit), 2048 MB, 1 CPU; VB default settings; 1 shared folder between host/guest
VirtualBox: 4.1.8-75467-OSX.dmg, installed 4.1.8 Guest Additions and Extension Pack

Can provide more information upon request (pls, tell me what and where).

[wolli123]

Hello together,

may be my experiences can help.

My host operating system ist ubunto 11.10 64 Bit. My Guest is windows 7 64 Bit.

My guest system stops also for some minutes during normal run. After a long travel through the internet i found the reason.

Motherboard type Ich9 caused the trouble. Switched to PIIX3 and all the trouble has gone.

I also have a solaris 11 express 64 Bit guest on a windows 7 64 Bit host. The guest uses 4 GB ram, 4 CPU and motherboard PIIX3. Solaris is running slow. Boot takes a long time and shutdown even more. This is realy bad and i have not found the reason for that until now.

Maybe someone has an idea?

Best regards and Helau (carnival in germany now)
Wolli123

[susu.exp]

Hello together,
...

I also have a solaris 11 express 64 Bit guest on a windows 7 64 Bit host. The guest uses 4 GB ram, 4 CPU and motherboard PIIX3. Solaris is running slow. Boot takes a long time and shutdown even more. This is realy bad and i have not found the reason for that until now.

Maybe someone has an idea?

Best regards and Helau (carnival in germany now)
Wolli123

Prost Wolli!

Need more info, could you perhaps attach the output of: VBoxManage showvminfo <"vm name"> ?

Have you tried booting the S11 VM with just 2 cpus? Ramshankar remarked previously on the nonlinear relationship between # of cpus and VM performance... Have you ruled this out?
I ask this because I have a RHEL guest that seems to run better on 2 cpus than 4 (on a 16-core host).