I have a Jumpstart infrastructure set up that has had no problems installing Solaris natively on my servers. However, when I attempt to do so within a virtual machine, the Solaris/Jumpstart installation hangs after the Grub menu. I see it get the DHCP and if I do a snoop on the interface of the jumpstart server I can see the tftp. It looks like the tftp finishes correctly and I see a couple NFS 4 requests from the client but the console on the vm never shows anything but dots and eventually the dots stop coming up. I don’t see any error messages on the client at all.
The jumpstart server is a V240 running Solaris 10. We have a /tftpboot directory for the pxegrub and inetboot files (depending on architecture). The jumpstart files are in a mount point /jumpstart where there are several different OS levels under /jumpstart/OS. The machine has multiple nics connected to various subnets.
I only have one server setup as an ESX server. On that ESX server I currently have two virtual machines, machineA and machineB. I used the DVD to install machingA since Jumpstart was not working and I set up machineB to continue testing it. I am able to ping the Jumpstart server, which is on the same subnet, from both the VMware ESX console and from the running Solaris virtual machine.
The console= kernel parameter (e.g console=ttya) can help with switching between serial and video on physical x86 hardware, but that issue does not apply to a virtual machine.
If such a flag is present, try removing the console=ttya flag and attempt the Jumpstart installation again.
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