Today, Sun Microsystems is shipping their update to xVM Ops Center, version 1.1. Each release improves upon the previous, this one's got much better OS update capabilities and even snappier. I could be biased, being part of the Sun xVM team and all, but our development and QA test teams have done a fantastic job getting this update ready. I couldn't resist a test drive, but this install, I wanted to do it in style.
I downloaded the latest version of xVM VirtualBox 1.6 and our latest shipping Solaris 10 update 5. After about 3 minutes of download and install time for xVM VirtualBox (that included making a dynamically growing file system), I kicked off the Solaris install. The performance was very good, almost like I was installing natively on a server.
But... darn.. I made the partition too small for xVM Ops Center (it likes space for its image libraries and file caching). No problem in VirtualBox... I created another dynamic disk file, about 100gb, and added it to my Solaris 10 virtualbox as a secondary IDE. A quick reconfigure reboot of my Solaris OS, a newfs command on c0d1s2, a quick edit of the /etc/vfstab, and a final mountall and I had the 100gb available.
I fired up a Firefox browser, and downloaded xVM Ops Center 1.1 (right after the first version was posted). This was probably the slowest part, as I was using NAT through my system, through our corporate VPN, and down to my virtualbox server, about 100KB/s. (I'm always amazed all this networking works... so would you be if you knew what was happening behind the scenes to make this happen) I gunzip'd it, untar'd it, then ran through a flawless install on my new 100gb vdisk. Then typed in my server name and port 9443 into my local Solaris browser... and bingo! I was up and running. My next task is to fire up two more virtualbox servers (Solaris and SuSe Linux), and I'll do some xVM management. Sweet!
Note: this was for demo purposes only. While all may work in this configuration, it has not been tested. :)
