Chapter 22. VirtualBox
IN THIS CHAPTER
Getting started
Managing VirtualBox
Guest additions
The command line interface
Networking
Storage
Remote access
Using VirtualBox within a zone
VirtualBox is an open source type 2 hypervisor that can be used on OpenSolaris and a variety of other systems. As described in Chapter 17, a type 2 hypervisor runs on top of the host operating system, so it is extremely easy to install, set up, and use. However, performance is usually not as good as with a type 1 hypervisor. Given these trade-offs, VirtualBox is an excellent solution for users, such as software developers, who need the capability to easily and concurrently run different operating systems, but it might not be the right solution for deploying a production system.
One of the advantages of VirtualBox is that it runs on many different host operating systems, including OpenSolaris, Mac OS, Windows, and various distributions of Linux, such as Debian, Fedora, Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu, and others. Because of this, it provides an attractive way to start using OpenSolaris, even if your system has no free partition to install and run on bare metal.
To run VirtualBox, you need an x86-based system running one of the supported host operating systems, and you should have enough extra memory and disk space, and a fairly powerful CPU to support running the hypervisor.
As shown in this chapter, a VirtualBox virtual machine (VM) can be configured to emulate many different facets of a modern x86-based PC. This enables ...
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