[OpenIndiana-discuss] New system planning comments

[Carl Brewer]

> Ten years ago a VM was not viable for building OI, but 14 cores and 64 GB of DRAM seems to me likely to handle it.  Is an OI VM running on top of OI viable for building and testing?  In particular, how good is VBox for that?  it's become very Windows host oriented.  I'm also aware the Solaris USB support is not very good.  I'll have Win 7 and Debian available  running native on a Z400 if USB proves an issue for working with microcontrollers which is my primary use case for both of those.

FWIW I use VBox on OI to host a bunch of GNU/Linux and NetBSD servers on 
a couple of basic Intel i5 consumer-grade PCs with 32GB of RAM.  Runs 
fine, I'm not doing anything that uses a GUI, it's all just a virtual 
server that I get into using SSH.  It depends on what you're trying to 
get your guests to do and how much risk you're prepared to accept.  For 
my use case (virtualised UNIX servers to run Moodle, BIND, postfix etc) 
it's a very capable solution, cheap and so far (more than 10 years) 
bombproof.

I knocked up some rudimentary start up scripts that use VNC to start the 
VBox GUI, but you can do it all just from the command line if you don't 
want the convenience of the VBox GUI. For me, ht VBox GUI is a 
compelling thing! I don't have the time to waste learning a bunch of 
PITA command line stuff when I can use the VBox GUI to make and manage 
VMs. "easy"

Carl