VMware Links: Solaris as a 32 bit VMware Guest and VDI
July 10th, 2007 by Lou
Excessive hyperlink WARNING: If you don’t like a lot of hyperlinks in your blog reading, stop now!
I ran across this note from Dirk Grobler on one of the lists I’m on:
“As we all know the performance of S10 on Vmware is not great, specifically the networking seems to be very slow. One reason for this is that the network driver for Solaris 64bit is not replaced by the vmxnet of VMware. In 32 bit mode this actually happens and the performance is much better. Unfortunately 64-bit mode is automatically selected, if the host is supporting it. Forcing 32-bit mode can be done though.
“Check out this article for more info.”
After a little follow-up research I found a Sun Blueprints article, “Sun Virtual Desktop Access Kit for VMware” (March 2007) by Dirk Grobler of Sun Engineering and Warren Ponder of VMware Desktop Technical Marketing. This paper refers to another paper by Warren Ponder, “Sun Desktop Virtualization Solution”
Since I’m posting these, I should also refer to several other related articles I’m aware of. There are some instructions for a Sun Ray VDI solution on the Sun Ray User’s Group Wiki site called the “VDA Cookbook“. The virtual lab I have set up uses a subset of these instructions.
If network performance is a concern, it may be preferable to run the Solaris Sun Ray server VMware guest in 32 bit mode to get the optimized VMware vmxnet driver when deploying a VDI solution. The general recommendation is to run a production Sun Ray VDI deployment with the Sun Ray Server on it’s own host, such as a T2000, rather than as a VMware guest. The heavy networking workload is one of the reasons for this.
32 bit, 64 bit, solaris, solaris x86, sun ray, vda, vdi, vmware