Solaris 10 Serial Console

  1. Enable a serial port for the VM.
    1. Enable Port 1
    2. Port Number COM1
    3. Port Mode: Host Pipe
    4. Create Pipe
    5. Port/File Path: /tmp/vb-VM-NAME-console
  2. Perform a reconfiguration boot on the VM.
  3. Install socat on the host system
    sudo apt-get install socat
  4. Change the eeprom console device for the VM:
    eeprom console=ttya
  5. Change the /boot/grub/menu.lst for the VM:
    ...
# To enable grub serial console to ttya uncomment the following lines
# and comment out the splashimage line below
# WARNING: don't enable grub serial console when BIOS console serial
#       redirection is active!!!
serial --unit=0 --speed=9600
terminal serial
#
# Uncomment the following line to enable GRUB splashimage on console
#splashimage /boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
#
# To chainload another OS
...
  6. Bring down the VM:
    init 5
  7. Once this is done, we can now tell VirtualBox to boot the VM headless and connect with socat 
    VBoxManage startvm node1 --type headless && socat -,raw,echo=0 /tmp/vb-node1-console