Sunday, September 23, 2007

Xen: Full Virt Solaris 10, Pt 5

My praises of Fedora 7 seem much too premature. I seems the Xen technology in this release is highly transitional. After nearly a month of working on this, I have found managed to get Solaris 10 installed, but there was a catch.

On a Xen system, Dom0 owns the hardware and controls access to the guests. Unfortunately, Dom0 will not give Solaris 10 access to any hardware except the video and the keyboard. Since I had multi-ISO install media, I could not complete an install. The problem was the fact the after the first CD, the guest was never allowed access to the media again.

The solution came from Per Hjartoy, who has observed the behavior for Windows guests. (see his efforts: install trouble with CD-RW, win2k3 server hangs) He recommended using the DVD ISO as the install media rather than a real CD. Thus, no swapping of disks.

Thank you. It worked, as I now have an accessible Solaris 10 environment... As long as I use the console! You see, the network card is hardware, and the Hypervisor won't let Solaris access the network. Thus, I have a working guest, but no way to access it.

Very frustrating.

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