(Note this is a guest post from Tenox)

Despite having an unofficial and experimental support for some time now I was not able to install Solaris 9 on VMware Workstation. I have recently upgraded to Workstation 9.0 and Lorenzo Gatti send me a link to complete Solaris 9 x86 u5 media kit so I had an excuse to retry.

After several tries I have determined that the easiest route is to boot and install from cd1 instead of the install disk. Also make sure to select VESA driver instead of standard VGA to get a decent resolution. VMware tools won’t install but it’s not a big deal. Apart from that everything else including networking works out of the box.

Just as a final note Solaris 9 is now 10 years old, time flies fast!

Update:
I have also installed Solaris 8 in a similar manner. Unfortunately it doesn’t have VESA drivers so all I could get is 640×480.