[OpenIndiana-discuss] New system planning comments

[Jim Klimov]

On April 18, 2021 10:05:02 AM UTC, Carl Brewer <carl at bl.echidna.id.au> wrote:
>
>> 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
>
>
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On that front, I "must" mention my vboxsvc project:
* https://github.com/jimklimov/vboxsvc
* nee https://sourceforge.net/projects/vboxsvc

Beside allowing to wrap each vbox into an SMF instance (dependencies, restarts by state monitoring and all), among other features it also has a way to get a GUI console (e.g. in a VNC session to host) to a headless VM, by save-state and resume.

Also can praise phpVirtualbox as a decent and useful web-gui to a VBox host.

Jim Klimov

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