When building a Solaris x64 guest on VMware , the boot sequence when booting from the Solaris DVD seems to take forever. About 5 minutes in fact. Which is really annoying if you are trying to automate installing Solaris and you need to restart 50 times a day. The part I am talking about is after you select to boot Solaris from the grub menu – there is a sequence of dots that comes up until the next Solaris kernel seems to load. Incidentally the guest’s CPU goes to 100% during this sequence, which could be an issue if you are running on a loaded system.
Luckily there is a workaround. Go into the ‘edit settings’ screen for the Solaris guest and click the options tab. Change the Guest Operating System Version to Solaris 10 32 Bit, instead of 64 bit. Then the boot goes more like this:
[flashvideo file=http://www.torkwrench.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/solaris-10-boot-good.flv /]
I made a screen cast of the slow boot as well, but it literally is the same thing as above, except it just goes on for 5 minutes. It could be the most boring video on the internet. The fast boot video above is probably the second most boring video on the internet! It’s just a hard problem to explain in words.
This setting doesn’t mean that you’ll be running a 32 bit OS or anything either – as far as I can tell it doesn’t do anything besides fix the slow boot problem!