Home / server / Questions / 443005
Accepted
Kendrick
Asked: 2012-10-28 10:41:27 +0800 CST

solaris 11 express hosting vm's

  • 772

I have been trying to wrap my head around this one. I have not seen a decent yes/no or how answer yet.

I have a solaris 11 zfs server I want to host 2 or 3 vm's on it and have them use a loop network to connect to nfs on the solaris box for main storage.

It appears that the xen xVM componants are installed on the system and I would be able to host from there but xvm-gui and xvm packages seems to be empty, no files in it but virt-manager and xvmstore do. the oracle vm server seems to be a bare metal solution. I am starting down the virtualbox road but would rather use xen.

Any Documentation on how its setup on 11 express or a difinitive yes/no is appriciated.

virtualization

2 Answers

  1. Solaris Zones are useful for service isolation, but each of the "vms" are going to be running solaris, so you can't run windows or a few linux applications.

    What you need to be using is Joyent's SmartOS. They are an Open Solaris fork with some of the main Solaris devs working on them. They ported KVM to their kernel and have tools to support running KVM instances.

    http://joyent.com/technology/smartos

    That will allow you to leverage the ZFS file system within your KVM zones:

    http://lwn.net/Articles/459754/

    • 2
  2. Best Answer

    You can go the SmartOS route, which is really a KVM virtualization port.

    The other approach is an all-in-one setup using another hypervisor, like VMWare ESXi and a ZFS-based OS. I use NexentaStor, but OpenIndiana works just as well.

    • 2