From my past experience, I can tell that so far VirtualBox is the ideal workstation virtualization solution for running Solaris 11 guests, especially VirtualBox guest additions support Solaris 11 guest operating system fairly well.
I have had a few troubles running Solaris 11 in VirtualBox, despite VirtualBox's excellent support to Solaris 11 guest. Here I write down the issue solutions.
Issue #1 - Solaris 11 has very poor installation / shutdown / boot performance
Solaris installation speed, shutdown and boot speed are very very poor compare to Linux guests, I am yet to find a solution for that - maybe Solaris has generally poor shutdown/boot speed? But disabling unnecessary system services (using svcadm and svcs utilities) and get rid of unused GNOME startup applications seem to help a little bit.
Issue #2 - Do not force umount CD/DVD in VirtualBox
Forcibly umount CD/DVD that is still being used by Solaris 11 will guarantee to cause Solaris 11 to become unresponsive, with 100% CPU usage.
Issue #3 - Watch out when you install software packages
When I install a distribution, I always like to install as many software packages as I can... if you are same as me, be aware that Solaris 11 will kill itself if you install one of its "solaris" published software package. The package is called system/install/media/internal. Google search suggests that the package is used only for live DVD media and is not intended to be installed to an already completed Solaris 11 installation.
Issue #4 - Network traffic spike leads to 100% CPU usage and unresponsive Solaris 11
I have had this very weird issue - After my Solaris 11 was up for 2 to 3 hours, Gnome System Monitor showed a network transmission spike up to 4GBytes per second, and after that, Solaris reported 100% CPU usage that lasts 5 seconds, then CPU usage came down to normal for 5 seconds, and went to 100% for 5 seconds again - repeat like that until a reboot. This problem made my Solaris 11 virtual machine totally unusable. I discovered this small change which may help to solve the issue, replace the content of
/usr/shjare/vpanels/java.policy with:
grant {
permission java.security.AllPermission;
};
Issue #5 - Eclipse randomly freezes
If you run Eclipse indigo in Solaris 11 in VirtualBox, your Eclipse may randomly freeze every few minutes, the reason is that Eclipse has used up all PermGen space allocated to it by default by Solaris's Hotspot JVM. To solve the issue, run Eclipse with the following command line arguments:
/opt/eclipse-3.7.2/eclipse -vmargs -XX:PermSize=128m -XX:MaxPermSize=384m -Xms128m -Xmx1024m
That will guarantee enough PermGen space for running Eclipse under Solaris 11.