While trying to monitor a JVM on a remote system using visualvm the activation of JMX gave me some challenges. Dr Google and my employers documentation quickly revealed some -D opts needed for JMX, but strangely it only worked for a Solaris 10 system (my setup: MacOS laptop monitoring SPARC Solaris based JVMs) On S11 with the same opts I saw that "my" JVM listening on port 3000 (which I chose for JMX), but visualvm was not able to get a connection. Finally I found out that at least my S11 installation needed an explicit setting of the RMI host name. This what finally worked:

        -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote=true \
        -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false \
        -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false \
        -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=3000 \
        -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=s11name.us.oracle.com \

Maybe this post saves someone else the time I spent on research