Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The configuration of the Container itself is straightforward, with the only dif-
ference being the addition of the VirtualBox control device
/dev/vboxdrv
. To
reduce the total storage required, we will use a sparse-root zone, as described in
Chapter 6. Because running a VirtualBox guest as the root user is discouraged,
we must create a regular user account to configure and run the VirtualBox guest.
Once the guest is installed, this account would be used only to make changes to
the guest configuration, such as adding more storage.
Once the Container is installed and properly configured, we must create the
VirtualBox guest and install the operating system, as described in Chapter 5. In
our example, an ISO image library with the Microsoft Windows XP installation
media is already present on the host system in a directory named
/iso
. This direc-
tory will be made available to the Container using a read-only loopback file system.
Because we will run Microsoft Windows XP in our guest machine, a few of the
VirtualBox settings may need modification. The host is a relatively modern x86
system with hardware virtualization features enabled in the BIOS. We will also
enable those features in the guest machine. The recommended network device
for Windows XP is the AMD PCNet FAST III. Because this is a desktop guest, we
recommend using the NAT feature of VirtualBox for the Container's interface. If
it were a server, bridged mode would be more appropriate, but would require the
Container to be configured as exclusive IP. Finally, for efficiency, we use a SATA
boot disk instead of the standard IDE configuration.
To roughly mimic the performance of a single-CPU PC, we will use a CPU cap for
this exercise. Each Container will start off with a cap of 1.00 CPU. This limit can
be dynamically adjusted from the global zone later, if required.
Because the Container will include our VirtualBox user's home directory, in-
cluding all of the guest's disk images, we will place the Container in a ZFS pool
that has enough space to hold the data. In this example, a pool named
pandora
has sufficient free disk space for our needs. We can easily create the ZFS file sys-
tem for our Container.
GZ#
zfs create -o mountpoint=/zones pandora/zones
Now we are ready to configure and install the VirtualBox Container.
We begin by creating the Container's configuration. R efer to Chapter 6 for the
details of each setting. The Windows Container, named
winxp-desktop1
, has a
single IP address: 192.168.1.41.
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