Virtual Box with SMF control

SMF

The Service Management Facility (SMF), first introduced in Solaris Nevada, as project Greeline, and then later in the commercial Sun Solaris, is the modern way to manage system and application services in a self healing, fault tolerant way. It replaces the old init mechanism.

Some historical background information (including all the PSARCs) on SMF is still available at opensolaris.org.

Another good read is the Joyent wiki.

VirtualBox

Alexandre Dumont published some scripts for Virtual Box, to integrate with SMF. That was in 2009. Not too long ago, I was trying to find his blog and it was down.

I just stumbled upon:
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=33249

And there is a sourceforge project for it, here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vboxsvc/

Installation

From the README, using the pkgadd in a global zone:

    # gzcat COSvboxsvc-0.16.pkg.gz > /tmp/x
    # pkgadd -d /tmp/x -G

You probably want the -G flag. It doesn't block you from manually installing
the same package in a certain local zone where you'd use VirtualBox, but
it blocks automatic package propagation to those local zones which are
not expected to use and run VirtualBox. For us these zones are rare,
zero or one per machine (there is no definite/hardcoded limit though). YMMV.

To update the package you can simply remove the old version and install
anew, i.e.:
    # gzcat COSvboxsvc-0.16.pkg.gz > /tmp/x
    # pkgrm COSvboxsvc
    # pkgadd -d /tmp/x -G

A cleaner way is to use an admin file to overwrite an existing package,
i.e. one from LiveUpgrade:
    # gzcat COSvboxsvc-0.16.pkg.gz > /tmp/x
    # pkgadd -d /tmp/x -G -a /etc/lu/zones_pkgadd_admin

Also note that this package "depends" on SUNWvbox, so that should be
installed beforehand.