[OpenIndiana-discuss] Virtualbox on OpenIndiana

[Bayard G. Bell]

Hi, Geoff,

On Fri, 2012-03-23 at 19:33 -0700, Geoff Nordli wrote:
> It would think  vbox running on an illumos host would work pretty well
> since I assume Oracle runs their VDI solution on Solaris.  Do we think
> there is going to be a lot of difference between Solaris and Illumos?

When last I checked with the developers, the primary Unix development
platform for VirtualBox is Ubuntu. I'd be really surprised if Oracle was
trying to position Solaris, which is sold on high-margin hardware, for a
commodity deployment scenario like VDI hosting.

Solaris's pricing model and hardware constraint fairly effectively limit
it to the kind of fat trunk stuff around which the rest of Oracle's
business is based, which I think is a shame, as the kind of
general-purpose load you see from running on leaf nodes is what an OS
should be able to do. For Oracle, though, that lacks a bit too much in
the obvious cha-ching factor to have management take risks.

I'd say it's hard to tell the difference between the positioning and
sales model Oracle's given Solaris and what IBM does with AIX, and I
don't mean that to flatter either one. Both sell IT to equity analysts,
not customers, so nothing's interesting if it doesn't have an obvious
65% margin on it.

</rant>

> So what you are leaning towards is running Illumos as a guest is that right?

I'm leaning against using it as a guest for systems development. As
Milan's indicated elsewhere, people may be willing to pay what looks
like a VBox tax for more modest compile loads, where you don't have to
pay out in large lumps. I wouldn't want to deal with the order of
magnitude loss of speed to compile something like illumos or gcc with
it.

Cheers,
Bayard