As we discussed off-line, it seems that the amount of effort needed to implement this may be comparable to updating the existing implementation to deal with the VirtualBox changes over the past few months, and it seems to insulate VMC better from churn in VB, so I'm positive on pursuing this further.

Dave

On 05/28/10 06:13 PM, Alok Aggarwal wrote:
Currently the VM constructor part of DC uses
VirtualBox cli to construct VM images. This
is all well and good except for the fact that
the the vbox cli keeps changing rather frequently
which results in breakages such as the following -

13237  Virtual Machine Constructor doesn't support
         building VM's with VirtualBox 3.1
https://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=13237

Thus, it seems prudent to investigate an alternate
way of generating VM images, one that doesn't rely
on the vbox cli's as much.

Just recently, I did some experiments where I
was able to -

a) Create a plain file and export it as an iSCSI
     target
b) Install OpenSolaris into that iSCSI target
c) After the install was done, take that installed
     instance encapsulated in a file and convert it
     into a VDI/VMDK with vdiskadm(1M)
d) Boot a vbox instance off of a text installer
     media and import the root pool contained in that
     VDI/VMDK *
e) Boot another vbox instance with the resultant
     VDI/VMDK

This effectively limits the use of vbox cli's
significantly, it's only needed in (d).

What do people think about re-tooling VMC to use
this approach instead?

Thanks,
Alok

(*) The installed root pool has the iSCSI device id
      embedded within it. So, when it is booted under
      virtual box (and it attaches to a different driver --
      IDE/SCSI/SATA), the device id changes. This prevents
      the machine from being booted off of that root pool.
      The 'zpool import' in (d) is thus necessary to update
      device id appropriately before the VM can be booted
      under vbox.
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