8 launching more than 120 vms on solaris hosts, 9 using serial ports, Launching more than 120 vms on solaris hosts – Sun Microsystems VIRTUALBOX 3.0.0 User Manual

Page 134: Using serial ports

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9 Advanced topics

to the VBoxSDL main thread (first entry in the ps list). For example, when switching
away to another VT and saving the virtual machine from this terminal, the following
sequence can be used to make sure the VM is not saved with stuck modifiers:

kill -usr1 <pid>

VBoxManage controlvm "Windows 2000" savestate

9.8 Launching more than 120 VMs on Solaris hosts

Solaris hosts have a fixed number of IPC semaphores IDs per process preventing users
from starting more than 120 VMs. While trying to launch more VMs you would be
shown a “Cannot create IPC semaphore” error.

In order to run more VMs, you will need to bump the semaphore ID limit of the

VBoxSVC process. Execute as root the prctl command as shown below. The process
ID of VBoxSVC can be obtained using the ps list command.

prctl -r -n project.max-sem-ids -v 2048 <pid-of-VBoxSVC>

9.9 Using serial ports

Starting with version 1.4, VirtualBox provided support for virtual serial ports, which,
at the time, was rather complicated to set up with a sequence of VBoxManage
setextradata

statements. Since version 1.5, that way of setting up serial ports

is no longer necessary and deprecated. To set up virtual serial ports, use the methods
now described in chapter

3.7.8

Serial ports

, page

Note: For backwards compatibility, the old setextradata statements,
whose description is retained below from the old version of the manual, take
precedence

over the new way of configuring serial ports. As a result, if config-

uring serial ports the new way doesn’t work, make sure the VM in question
does not have old configuration data such as below still active.

The old sequence of configuring a serial port used the following 6 commands: