- 5.1 How Oracle VM VirtualBox Works
- 5.2 Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Platform
- 5.3 Oracle Solaris as an Oracle VM VirtualBox Host
- 5.4 Oracle Solaris as an Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest
- 5.5 Creating and Managing Oracle VM VirtualBox Guests
- 5.6 Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
5.4 Oracle Solaris as an Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest
Solaris 10 is a fully supported guest OS for VirtualBox. A full complement of Guest Additions is available, including seamless mode and accelerated 3D graphics. For optimal performance, the following settings are recommended for a Solaris guest:
- Boot disk: SATA (one of the first four ports with IDE compatibility mode enabled)
- CD-ROM: Master device on the second IDE channel (the default)
- Network: Intel Pro/1000MT Desktop
- Hardware acceleration: Enabled if supported by the host
- Nested page tables: Enabled if supported by the host
- PAE/NX: Enabled
As with all supported guests, the Guest Additions are provided on a CD-ROM image file that is automatically installed with VirtualBox. The Oracle Solaris Guest Additions are included in a single SVR4 data stream package named VBoxSolarisAdditions.pkg. As with the host packages, if a previous release of the Guest Additions is installed, it must be removed before a new version can be installed. Rebooting the guest after the new additions are installed is strongly recommended; this step is not required when the Guest Additions are first installed.
The following command installs the Guest Additions on a new Solaris guest:
# pkgadd -d /cdrom/cdrom0/VBoxSolarisAdditions.pkg all
Once the Guest Additions are installed, all of the ancillary features—such as the ability to resize the guest display automatically and implement the shared clipboard—should be available for use.
One special feature of the Guest Additions is shared folders. It allows the guest to share files with other guests and the host via the host's native file system. In Oracle Solaris, the shared folders are made available as a vboxfs file system. Shared folders are defined per guest in the VirtualBox GUI or via the VBoxManage command line. In the following example, the directory /export/iso on the host is shared as /iso with a Solaris 10 guest. On the host platform, issue the following command to create the shared folder. In this example, the guest is named Solaris10.
Host% VBoxManage sharefolder add Solaris10 --name iso \
--hostpath /export/iso
Now the guest can mount and access the file system, as in the following example:
# mkdir /iso # mount -F vboxfs -o uid=1234,gid=5678 iso /iso # ls -la /iso total 19720801 drwxrwxrwx 1 1234 5678 4096 Dec 1 16:02 . drwxr-xr-x 34 root root 35 Feb 12 20:51 .. drwxrwxrwx 1 1234 5678 4096 Sep 9 08:43 centos drwxrwxrwx 1 1234 5678 4096 Aug 27 13:22 fedora drwxrwxrwx 1 1234 5678 8192 Feb 1 12:20 opensolaris drwxrwxrwx 1 1234 5678 4096 Oct 25 10:29 oracle drwxrwxrwx 1 1234 5678 8192 Aug 31 13:44 redhat drwxrwxrwx 1 1234 5678 4096 Sep 9 08:56 rescue drwxrwxrwx 1 1234 5678 4096 Feb 3 16:12 s10 drwxrwxrwx 1 1234 5678 8192 Feb 3 21:57 s11 drwxrwxrwx 1 1234 5678 0 Aug 31 13:31 suse drwxrwxrwx 1 1234 5678 0 Aug 9 2009 ubuntu drwxrwxrwx 1 1234 5678 8192 Feb 13 00:38 windows
Because the file permission and ownership abstractions may not translate directly between the host operating system and that of the guest, the user starting the virtual machine in the host must have appropriate access to the files being shared. Inside the guest, the owner and group are set by mount options—in this case, user 1234 and group 5678.