Solaris VirtualBox image takes 3 Minutes to boot, displays Blue Screen

Maclean Liu(刘相兵

Solaris VirtualBox image takes 3 Minutes to boot, displays Blue Screen within Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Applies to:
Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure - Version: 3.2 to 3.2.1 - Release: 3.0 to 3.0
Information in this document applies to any platform.
Symptoms

When the Solaris 10 VirtualBox image is booting, it can take up to 3 mins. After the VirtualBox logo a Solaris blue screen appears and nothing happens for 75 seconds, then the boot process starts.
The biggest amount of time is consumed between GRUB launch and the very first moment of the Solaris boot. The time between GRUB and the pop up of the line “ Sun OS Release 5.10” can take more than a minute, sometimes close to 2 minutes, to just showing the Solaris blue screen.
Cause

During bootstrap, the BIOS in VirtualBox effectively reads one sector at a time, which is fairly exhaustive with non-local storage. Even a fast iSCSI server has much higher latency than a local disk, and combined with the fact that Solaris 10 easily has 180MB of boot archive will quickly quantify the poor performance.
Solution

There is a build of VirtualBox available for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3.2.1 that will alleviate the problem, that can be downloaded from:

http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/.testcase/vbox_3.2.13r69126.zip

This build provides improved performance in the context of disk accesses.