UsingVMWare

Here is the product information on VMWare for Mac:
http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/

There is another page describing how to use VirtualBox instead, but most suggestions here apply for VirtualBox as well.

Good settings:

• Memory: 1280 Mb (allocate 1/3 to 1/2 of your Mac's memory, if you plan to do heavy program development)
• Processors: 2 (use both cores, for parallel builds)
• CD/DVD: Uncheck "Connected" (it is confusing when Solaris hijacks your inserted media)
• Network: Connected, NAT (NAT lets it hide behind the Mac's network identity)
• Shared Folders: Do not use /hgfs before Fusion 1.1 FCS, or you'll crash your VM.
• USB: deselected.

To use VMWare's shared folder feature instead of NFS, do this:

• In VMWare, select Virtual Machine => Settings
• Select Shared Folders, press "+" (Add Shared Folder...).
• Add /Users/joeuser, name the share joeuser, check Enabled.
• Rehost your Solaris home directory to your Mac disk.

    # mv /export/home/joeuser{,.orig}
    # ln -s /hgfs/joeuser/solaris-devx-home /export/home/joeuser
    

However, this is known to cause system crashes in VMWare releases before 1.1FCS.

Integrity of Data Stored in Solaris

If you put important data on your guest Solaris disk, you are betting that there are no bugs in the entire stack which supports that disk. This includes Solaris, VMWare, and OSX. VMWare is probably the weak link, especially since it has an auto-update feature that encourages you to download new versions. OSX may also be weak in its large-file handling--this matters since Solaris puts an entire disk image into one OSX file.

In addition, data stored in Solaris disks is lost when you reset to a snapshot. But you probably want to use the snapshot feature, because it is a really handy way to get back to a known state after a Mac OS X reboot. (For example, you can set your snapshot to have a running XEmacs with Gnu screen and gnuserver sessions already initialized.)

FInally, if you keep your data stored on Mac OS X disks instead of Solaris disks, you can use the Spotlight feature (full text indexing) to locate your files. This alone is enough reason to keep all your non-transient data on Mac OS X. Spotlight will help you find files of all sorts, inncluding mail messages, documents, presentations, and source files.

It is best to store your files on OSX and NFS to them from Solaris. This requires setting up OSX as an NFS server, at least locally to Solaris.

Someday, it may be better and faster to access your files from VMWare's shared folder mechanism (/hgfs, the host/guest file system), but for the foreseeable NFS is the robust alternative.

If you build big systems (like OpenJDK), do your builds in Solaris /tmp, so that you get full speed read and write. Pushing your build product out to Mac disk via NFS is not recommended. However, reading sources via NFS seems to be quite fast enough. As noted above, keeping your sources inside the VMWare image would be asking for trouble, so the best solution for software development seems to be putting source on Mac disk and imported into Solaris via NFS, and putting build products in RAM-disk via Solaris /tmp.

Using Snapshots

After you are comfortable developing on the virtual Solaris image, consider making a snapshot. Snapshots are a great way to get back to normal after you have to reboot your Mac (or your Solaris crashes). First, initialize your development environment, but without doing much. (For example, start a terminal session, and run screen -xRR. If you are using Emacs, start Emacs and do M-x gnuserv-start. Then close the terminal session.) Next, in the VMWare GUI, select Virtual Machine => Take Snapshot.

Later on, when you want to snap back to that state, do this:

• Relaunch VMWare, if necessary.
• Double-click on your Solaris VM in the main VMWare "Virtual Machine Library" window.
• While it is trying to reboot, immediately select Virtual Machine => Revert to Snapshot.
• Wait a minute or so, and then log into Solaris.