About Booting the Solaris Control Domain

Whether to run Solaris as a virtualized control domain or as a standalone operating system is a boot-time decision. To run the Solaris operating system as a standalone system, continue to use the same GRUB menu entries that you use currently.

To run the Solaris system as a control domain with the Sun xVM hypervisor, you must do one of the following:

• Set Solaris xVM as the default entry to be booted.

• Select the number of the Solaris xVM entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst during the boot process.

This boots the hypervisor, which in turn boots the control domain.

In the Solaris xVM entry for booting Solaris as a control domain with the hypervisor, the kernel$ line refers to the hypervisor, and there are two module$ lines. The first module$ line must list the path to unix twice, with any arguments. Arguments are represented by * at the end of a line in the example. The second module$ line lists the path to the boot archive.

How to Boot the Solaris Control Domain

1. Become superuser, or assume the Primary Administrator role.
2. Locate the Solaris xVM entry in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file:

   # bootadm list-menu
   The location for the active GRUB menu is: /dev/dsk/c2t0d0s0 (not mounted)
   The filesystem type of the menu device is <ufs>
   default 3
   timeout -1
   0 Solaris Express Community Edition snv_79 X86
   1 Solaris xVM
   2 Solaris failsafe
   3 bfu ABE: xVM 64-bit
   4 bfu ABE: metal 64-bit

3. Select the Solaris xVM entry, option 1 in this procedure, from the list.

Troubleshooting

In some situations, the GRUB menu.lst file might not reside in /boot/grub. To determine the location of the active GRUB menu.lst file, use the bootadm command with the list-menu subcommand.

Setting the Solaris xVM Entry To Boot by Default

1. Become superuser, or assume the Primary Administrator role.
2. Find the number of the xVM entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst:

   # bootadm list-menu
   The location for the active GRUB menu is: /dev/dsk/c2t0d0s0 (not mounted)
   The filesystem type of the menu device is <ufs>
   default 3
   timeout -1
   0 Solaris Express Community Edition snv_79 X86
   1 Solaris xVM
   2 Solaris failsafe
   3 bfu ABE: xVM 64-bit
   4 bfu ABE: metal 64-bit

3. Set the default using the number of the entry:

   # bootadm set-menu default=1

How to View Domains on the System

Run the virsh list --all, xm list or the xm top commands to view the domains on the system. These commands provide details of running domains. The display from any of these commands should show the single control domain, called Domain-0.

1. Become superuser, or assume the Primary Administrator role.
2. Run virsh list --all .

   # virsh list --all Id Name                 State
   ----------------------------------
     0 Domain-0             running

See Also

See the xentop(1M)man pages.