New! March 26, 2012: VM Guest tools contains scripts and drivers that are used to create virtualized machine images in SmartOS.

In SmartOS, virtual machines are created using the vmadm create tool. This tool takes a JSON payload and creates either a 'kvm' or 'joyent' brand zone with the properties specified in the input JSON. Normal output is a series of single-line JSON objects with type set to one of:

• success
• failure
• update
• notice

each object having at least the 'type' and 'message' fields. A message of type 'success' or 'failure' will be followed by the process exiting with the exit status 0 indicating success and all other exits indicating failure.

Getting Started

You will need

• The latest copy of SmartOS, available from http://download.joyent.com (release details here)
• The ISO of your OS of choice
• A VNC client

The Machine JSON Description

Save the code snippet below to a file called "vmspec.json". You can make changes to the networks and other variables as appropriate. This is by no means an exhaustive list of all options. For all options see vmadm(1m). (Sizes are listed in MiB)

For releases before December 15, 2011, you will need to include the default_gateway attribute in the root: This must match the gateway of one of the nics so that the default gateway and resolvers will be set via DHCP in the VM.

When installing OS's that do not ship with virtio support instead of using virtio on the disk for the model use ide and e1000 for the network model.

Create the Empty Virtual Machine

Create the empty virtual machine using the create-machine tool. Please note that the virtual machine will not be running.

Note the UUID in the last step. This UUID is the ID of the VM and will be used to reference it for the rest of its lifecycle.

Copy your OS ISO to the zone

Ensure permissions are correct on the ISO

Boot the VM from the ISO Image

vmadm is the virtual machine administration tool. It is used to manage the lifecycle of a virtual machine after it already exists. We will boot the virtual machine we have just created, but tell it to boot off of the ISO image the first time it comes up.

Please note that the path for the ISO image will be the relative path of the ISO to the zone you are in. This is why it starts with the '/'

Use VNC to Connect to the VM

The vmadm tool can print out the information on the VM. You can also append a section to print specificially.

Your VM is now running. You can shutdown your virtual machine and it will still remain on disk. To learn more about managing the lifecycle of a virtual machine, run vmadm --help.

Troubleshooting

Zone Networking Issues

If you are running SmartOS as a guest vm then you might have networking issues with your zones. In order to fix this we need to create a bridge.
If you look at https://github.com/joyent/smartos-overlay/blob/master/lib/svc/method/net-physical#L179 You can see that the script will create a bridge for vmare products but if you are using VirtualBox or Parallells then you need to do it manually.

Your zones should now be able to access the network. You don't need to change the nic_tag for any of the zones, leave them as "admin" or "external".

There is a way to make this happen on boot with my adding an smf script to /opt/custom/smf. Here is a nice write up that shows you how it's done. http://www.psychicfriends.net/blog/archives/2012/03/21/smartosorg_run_things_at_boot.html#003979

Further Reading

Those versed in JavaScript can learn a lot more by reading the vmadm.js source.