How to Set up OpenSolaris 2008.11 or later as a Paravirtual Guest

Use this procedure to set up the OpenSolaris 2008.11 or later release as a paravirtual guest under Xen.

Note - This procedure presumes that you are running a Solaris dom0 (either Nevada or OpenSolaris) on your system.

Start installation

To start the installation of the OpenSolaris 2008.11 or later release, run the following commands:

# zfs create rpool/zvol 
# zfs create -V 10G rpool/zvol/domu-220-root 
# virt-install --nographics --paravirt --ram 1024 --name domu-220 -f /dev/zvol/dsk/rpool/zvol/domu-220-root -l /isos/osol-2008.11.iso

Note - This procedure assumes that your server is set up to assign dynamic addresses. If you want to assign static addresses, specify the --mac option.

Select defaults

For the purposes of this installation, choose the defaults on the console for the two questions regarding the server setup.

Connect to VNC

After the OpenSolaris 2008.11 Live CD has finished booting, a VNC session is available from within the guest domain. You can connect to the guest domain's VNC session as follows:

# domid=`virsh domid domu-220` 
# ip=`/usr/lib/xen/bin/xenstore-read /local/domain/$domid/ipaddr/0` 
# port=`/usr/lib/xen/bin/xenstore-read /local/domain/$domid/guest/vnc/port` 
# /usr/lib/xen/bin/xenstore-read /local/domain/$domid/guest/vnc/passwd 
DJP9tYDZ
# vncviewer $ip:$port

Caution - VNC sessions are not secure. However, since you need elevated privileges to read the VNC password from XenStore, the VNC sessions are secure as long as you run the VNC viewer locally on dom0, or via SSH tunnelling, or via another secure method.

You should be able to install the OpenSolaris 2008.11 or later release as a paravirtual guest now. Note that as of 2009.06, the VNC server is not available via this method after the install has completed. For post-install VNC setup, read How to Set Up VNC in a Solaris domU.