Summary: How to install Solaris 10 U9 in VMware with only ZFS as filesystem
Date: Around 2015
Refactor: 1 March 2025: Checked links and formatting.

Solaris 10 Update 9 was the first edition of solaris after Oracle took over Sun. There hasn't changed much in the install procedure, but I hadn't done a full ZFS install yet, so I decided to create a new howto. This page will have a follow up for post install configuration.

This installation was done in a VMware vSphere VM, with a vmxnet3 network adapter. That adapter is not natively supported by VMware, so the VMware Tools will have to be installed before the network card will be available.

Note: If you're looking for a installation with the root filesystem being UFS, take a look at Install Solaris 10 Update 8.

For this installation, this media was used:

• Used Media: sol-10-u9-ga-x86-dvd.iso

During the installation the following options were chosen to make sure all filesystems use ZFS and all software would be available:

• Install Option 4: Solaris Interactive Text (Console session) (Option 3 or 4 is required to install a ZFS root file system)

• Keyboard Layout: US-English
• Language: English

• Hostname: solarixbox
• TimeZone: Europe
• Countries and Regions: Netherlands

• Root Password: RootPass
• Remote Services Enabled: No

• Installation Method: Standard
• Eject a CD Automatically: No
• Auto Reboot: Yes
• Accept License: Yes
• Geographic Regions: Western Europe
• System Locale: Posix C (C)

• No Additional Products

• Filesystem Type: ZFS

• Software Selection: Entire Distribution

• ZFS Pool Name: rpool (default)
• ZFS Root Dataset Name: s10x_u9wos_14a (default)
• ZFS Pool Size (in MB): 45019 (default - max size)
• Size of Swap Area (in MB): 0 (will be created on different disk)
• Size of Dump Area (in MB): 2560 (default)
• Keep / and /var combined: yes

Check the profile summary:

Install VMware Tools according to the manual which comes down to:

• Click VM in the virtual machine menu, then click Guest → Install/Upgrade VMware Tools and click OK.
• Then use these commands to install the tools:

# cp /cdrom/vmwaretools/vmware-solaris-tools.tar.gz /tmp
# cd /tmp
# gunzip vmware-solaris-tools.tar.gz
# tar xvf vmware-solaris-tools.tar
# cd vmware-tools-distrib
# ./vmware-install.pl

Follow the prompts and reboot

Afterwards you can check the installation like this, depending on the VMware tools version you'll see this:

# /etc/init.d/vmware-tools status
vmware-guestd is running
vmware-memctld is running

or this:

# /etc/init.d/vmware-tools status
vmtoolsd is running

You can now continue configuring Solaris using the post install howto.