[OpenIndiana-discuss] Zone Networking under VirtualBox

[Jeppe Toustrup]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 20:30, Geoff Flarity <geoff.flarity at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I should preface this by saying that while I've used Solaris 10 for 3
> years a developer, I'm a very novice sysadmin.
>
> I'm very strongly considering using OI for a production deployment.
> One requirement however is that it run inside VirtualBox so that
> developers and create a VM for development testing and staging. Since
> we'll be using zones in production, zones also need to work under
> VirtualBox (OS X).
>
> Right now I'm using 'bridged' networking mode' under VirtualBox to
> boot OI. The global zone has it's own IP and everything seems fine.
> When I try to create a VNIC and try to use in a zone no matter what I
> try I can't reach the 'internet'. I'm not even sure what documentation
> applies (OpenSolaris docs seem dated, there's not much info on the
> wiki etc).
>
> I'd really appreciate it if someone could point me in the right
> direction here. The zones we create need to be able to hit the
> internet. The dev's also need to be able connect to the zones from the
> VirtualBox host OS. But that's about it.
>
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Geoff
>
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> OpenIndiana-discuss at openindiana.org
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Zones with exclusive networking inside VirtualBox can be a pain. This
is because VirtualBox doesn't know of the extra MAC addresses for the
VNIC's in OpenIndiana, and thus doesn't forward the packets to those
MAC addresses to the OpenIndiana server.

The only workarounds to this I can think of, is either using shared
networking, which may work depending on your needs. That way all zones
share the global zones MAC address, and will work fine. They do
however not get their own network stack.
Another workaround would be to add more virtual network interfaces in
VirtualBox, and then assign these interfaces to each zone. They will
appear as physical NICs to OpenIndiana.


--
Venlig hilsen / Kind regards
Jeppe Toustrup (aka. Tenzer)