This post is a step by step explanation about how to get an OpenSolaris 2008.11 run as a Xen DomU on a Linux Dom0.
To follow this, you’ll need a Linux machine ready for Xen (I run Xen 3.3.0), with vncviewer installed.

This post doesn’t explain the basics of Xen, so you might want to start by learning Xen if you don’t already know a bit of it.

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you might have seen posts about SSH, RSYNC, ZFS Snapshots and so on. This article aims at describing the big picture, and to explain how I’ve been using those tools and technologies to build my own home backup system.

ZFS is a great filesystem. Amongst its many features, it has snapshots. Let’s see how to use them.

OpenSolaris 2008.05 is released today, you can grab it from the OpenSolaris website.

The distribution is a bootable CD which will let you try it before installing. It includes most of the big hits of Solaris 10 (zfs, dtrace, containers and so on).

If you never tried Solaris or OpenSolaris, this might be a good kick start !

If you experience a slow SSH connection to a Solaris 10 host while after connection everything works fine, then read on !

If you want to know on which CD is a package, without :

1. Mounting CD
2. Searching
3. Unmounting
4. Swear and
5. Go back to 1

Then you can :

1. Mount CD #1 (mount -F hsfs /dev/dsk/ /mnt or, if you have automount cd /cdrom/cdrom0 or something like that)
2. Go in the Solaris_10/Product directory of the CD
3. Do grep -l .virtual_packagetoc_* which will output the .virtual_packagetoc_N where N is the number of the CD holding that package.

Exemple :