I'm trying to set up some Solaris 10 VMs, one 32bit and one 64bit, but running into some strange issues. Before I go into the details, just FYI our ESX 4 hosts are successfully running quite a few other 32 and 64bit Windows and Linux machines with no problems.
I created two VMs (vmware hardware v7), one set to Solaris 10 (32-bit), one set to Solaris 10 (64-bit). I then installed the OS on both. Solaris just has a single OS install DVD for both x86 and x64: sol-10-u8-ga-x86-dvd.iso ... During the install process I was never asked which version I wanted to install. Once the install were done I installed vmware-tools which installed fine and I rebooted them, VIC sees that vmware-tools is running OK.
Here is where the oddities begin.
On both systems...
"uname -a" shows x86, the 64bit one does not show x64 at all. "SunOS test-solaris-10-32 5.10 Generic_141445-09 i86pc i386 i86pc"
"getconf LONG_BIT" on both servers returns 32.
"isainfo -kv" returns "64-bit amd64 kernel modules"
When the VMs are powered on they both show up as Guest OS: Solaris 10 (64-bit) in VIC.
When the VMs are powered off one does show up as 32-bit and one as 64-bit in VIC.
When the servers are rebooted, on both I see "SunOS Release 5.10 Version Generic_141445-09 64-bit" on the screen briefly as the servers are shutting down.
When the servers boot up in the Grub boot menu there is only one option: "Solaris 10 10/09 s10x_u8wos_08a X86", and "Solaris failsafe"
Unfortunately I don't know enough about Solaris to know if this is Solaris being weird, or ESX 4 being weird. I need to create some custom package (PKG) files and I'm trying to create both an x86 and x64 version, but due to the issues above packages built on both machines seem to be identical. Maybe all that really matters for Solaris 10 is SPARC, or x86/x64?
Thanks for any insight!