Lukas Rovensky's Weblog: Lukas Rovensky's Weblog

I recently installed OpenSolaris 2008.05 in VirtualBox 1.6.0 both on Mac OS X and also on my workstation running Nevada, build 88 (which would be equal to SXCE build 88 but this build was skipped).

Virtual Machine Settings

Notes

VirtualBox installation was very easy on both platforms as well as installation of the OpenSolaris in the virtual machine. However, I met a few problems:

• ICMP protocol is not supported by VirtualBox's NAT engine, so the initial network test using ping failed. This is actually well documented in VirtualBox's User Manual and other TCP/IP based protocols work fine.
• My workstation is on NIS, while VirtualBox's NAT relies on DNS. So, I had to create /etc/resolv.conf file with nameserver entry.

NAT is the only networking option for Mac OS X, while Host Interface (virtual NIC) option is available for other platforms including Solaris. I tried the procedure described in VirtualBox's User Manual (only the manual steps led to successful creation of the virtual network interface) but so far I was not successful in setting this up. VirtualBox did not start the virtual machine -- I got the following error: "Failed to open VNIC "vnic0" in raw mode.". So, I must be doing something wrong and I still need to investigate this problem.

VirtualBox offers also great and easy to use command line interface -- VBoxManage -- which is very convenient for controlling the machine.

References