8. Creating a ZFS Lab in a Box

The examples in this book were tested on OpenSolaris 2008.11 and Solaris 10 10/08 using Virtual Box 2.1.x and 2.2.0. Virtual Box is a virtualization product that works with the desktop as well as the enterprise. Virtual Box can run multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single desktop system. In this case, it was used to do installation and testing quickly and easily on a MacBook Pro laptop with 4GB of RAM.

In this chapter, you’ll see how to configure a VM to run OpenSolaris with disks to practice ZFS skills. You can use the same host configuration with Solaris 10 10/08. The Virtual Box GUI presented is captured from a MacBook and is slightly different on other host OSs. The VM that will be created has 1GB of RAM and seven virtual disks (two IDE and five SATA) using Virtual Box 2.2. First you will create new disks for the virtual machine, and then you will create the virtual machine and install OpenSolaris. To finish the installation, you will install the Virtual Box Guest Additions package.