> Hello Everyone, > > My question is simply what are my best options for > successfully installing virtual tools on an Open > Solaris OS running on Sparc Architecture. My > hardware is a > Sun Blade 2500. From what I have read Virtualbox and > Xen do not work on Sparc > technologies. What options do I have? > > Thank you in advance for any advice,
What are you trying to virtualize? You can use zones, which aren't quite true virtualization, but do provide (with proper use of resource controls) reasonable isolation, to the point that they mostly act like a separate instance of Solaris (SPARC), although they're really still part of the same OS instance (which means an OS crash hits them all). On a newer sun4v architecture SPARC system (which yours is _not_), you could use "logical domains" (LDOMs), which is a bit like xen, but with a whole lot of CPU level support; however, all the guests would be SPARC OS's as well (typically Solaris, although maybe one of the *BSDs might be able to run as a guest LDOM). With LDOMs, a guest LDOM OS crash should _not_ affect the whole system. (a control or I/O domain LDOM OS crash would at least hang anything that depended on it) Trying to run anything x86 on SPARC isn't going to be very satisfactory. Programs like QEMU or Bochs could probably _do_ it, but they'd be very slow (as in, just about uselessly slow for most purposes), since the CPU(s) in a Sun Blade 2500 are quite slow compared to any reasonably modern x86. Even a SPARC CPU as modern as a corresponding x86 CPU would tend to be slower in most cases on a per-thread basis, although it would probably be capable of scaling well beyond what most x86 can do in a single SMP system. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-help mailing list opensolaris-help@opensolaris.org
