[OpenIndiana-discuss] New system planning comments

[Andreas Wacknitz]

Am 4/18/21 um 12:05 PM schrieb 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
>
Running VMs in VirtualBox makes only sense under certain requirements,
like eg. local display. OI has out-of-the-box better virtualization
methods: KVM and BHyve. For both you can create corresponding zones. If
possible, BHyve is the recommended new virtualisation method.

Typically they are both faster and more robust than running VBox as they
are first-class members of illumos, unlike VBox, BHyve being the
fastest. As they are both integrated in SMF via zones management if you
want, they are better suited for server environments. I recommend to
make yourself familiar with them.

Regards,
Andreas