I did poke around a bit with virtual machines and Solaris and got strange results.

With virtualbox the nic doesn't get recognised.

With vmware things always go wrong but in different ways:
1.Install:switched off when opening some big app (firefox/staroffice).
2.Install:some things just don't work
3.Install:crashes after X starts during installation.

Forget kqemu - I ate my arm waiting for 2 CD's to finish installing.

This is all on the same machine which is rock solid under load running compiles 24/7 at times.
(AMD64@2.2ghz,512mb for vm 12gb drive)

I did check with some manuals about virtualisation but there is nothing special in there besides that disabling the CD drive in the vm speeds things up (which was true in my case).

Are there any known gotcha's with vm's and Solaris or is it just me,again

I can't help here. I haven't installed Solaris on the top of something else yet.

I'm more interested the way around: installing other O/Ses on top of Solaris. Currently experiencing with Xen, qemu, and of course Zones and BrandZ.

How does qemu with Solaris as host do? Solaris as guest with a Linux host is terrible disk I/O wise.

I only tested a couple of already built small Linux distros disks to check functionality. Nothing intensive, everything looked okay but I didn't really push the systems.

I have tried to install solaris 10 as guest in quemu/KVM. I have reard in some success stories in some blogs, but in my case the installation went fine under KVM ( under quemu, the installation progam complained that the installation disk was not a installation disk -???- ), but after the installation, my VM just hangs on a infinite reboot loop. Im posting a thread about that.

I have a AMD64@1.6 GHz with 512Mb for the VM.

Zones in Solaris work well in my experience. Have had horrible troubles relating to USB devices with VMWare though. Some specific things that work fine on a bare metal install are really funky under VMWare.