[OpenIndiana-discuss] about to build a new OI server - suggestions?

[Carl Brewer]

Hi,

I'm about to build up a new OI server to run as a local VM host and CIFS 
fileserver on my LAN. I have been doing this for ~30 years now with 
various flavours of UNIX, but OI/OS since um, 2000 or so, when it was 
open sourced anyway, so I've been around, but only casually.

I use, and prefer VirtualBox for my VMs, poking through the pkg repo I 
see that it's still there (good!) despite various pushes towards bhyve 
or whatever else is short-term trendy.  7.0.18 is the release in there 
ATM.  That's reasonably current, nice!

Are there any issues with the most recent build of OI installing on 
current generation commodity motherboards? I'm planning to do my usual; 
just grab a good desktop MB, throw 64GB or so of RAM into it, a couple 
of M.2 SSDs for the OS as a ZFS mirror, some WD Red Pro spinning rust 
for the VMs and some big ones for my CIFS share.  In the past this has 
been sometimes a bit tricky to install - issues with the BIOS settings 
that are fiddly and a lot of trial and error (thank you Andraus for your 
help with these, when we had to roll our own build!).

I have had one really weird issue with graphics cards, I have had to put 
a dummy HDMI port onto my machines so they'll boot without locking up 
and breaking BIOS settings(!) if there's nothing plugged into the GFX 
card (nVidea something basic, I don't need high res, but I do want a 
GUI).  Wonder if that's still an issue?