Great I thought it was a bug. In the meantime I used the VMLite Guest additions from 3.6. That worked fine under 4.2. Will try the fixed version tonight.

Thanks.

Questions for Aussie_Bauer and Huisinro:

Several months ago, we three discussed (briefly) the issues of which SCSI controller to select for VMLWS 3.6 and how well either of the two available controllers would recognize various SCSI devices. I did a trial installation of V4.2 and didn't see different in the choice of two SCSI controllers, and didn't try either of my SCSI devices.

Dieter, have you been more successful in accessing SCSI devices when you've moved your VM Workstation virtual machine(s) to VMLWS 4.X?

Huisinro, does an installation of the current beta version, including the latest version of the VMLite Guest Additions, provide any greater (than V3.6) ability for the SCSI controller to recognize a SCSI devices other than SCSI drives? (I am particularly wanting to recognize an HP SCSI scanner and an Onstream tape device. Both of these devices are recognized in a "normal" WinXP installation, wherein the physical SCSI controller is recognized.)

Thx in advance for any insights.

Shen

It still won't recognize physical SCSI devices, only USB devices will be recognized. So far, I don't know if any other vm software would do this, except you may want to play with PCI passthru, but not available on vmlite yet. If you know any other vm can do this, please let me know.

The SCSI driver inside vm is different, it's mainly for disks. We are thinking of providing our own virtual scsi driver for the vm to accelerate the performance using our super fast vboot infrastructure (www.vmlite.com/index.php?option=com_cont...id=67&Itemid=177), this is still in very early stage. However, this won't help to recongnize your physical SCSI devices.

Thx for your quick reply, Huisinro.

Nope, I don't know of any other vm that will recognize the external SCSI devices. Was hoping that VMLWS would be the first! #;^)

Shen

Hi Shen,

unfortunately I can't assist you in your SCSI device driver issue\question. I have done a lot of testing and investigation regarding SCSI LSI and BusLogic support but that was all around SCSI disk drives. Because all of my VMWare clients (XP and 2003) where using SCSI drives (as recommended by VMWare) for disk access I had to get this working under VMLite. I am now able to run these VMWare clients using LSI SCSI drivers in XP and 2003. However the use of SATA is a better option under VMLite (but wasn't supported under VMWare). In comparision the SATA drivers are about 17 % more efficient compared to SCSI drivers.

Regarding you issue, I would guess that your SCSI devices have specific drivers which you should be able to install under VMLite. Assuming your hardware is detected in the VMLite client than you should definitely be able to install the appropriate SCSI driver you use before. If the hardware uses the generic SCSI driver than you should try the driver that came with your hardware. I am using the LSI Logic PCI-X Ultra320 SCSI Host Adapter with MS driver version 5.2.3790.1830 for my Windows 2003 clients and the LSI Adapter, Ultra320 SCSI 2000 series w/1020/1030 Host adapter with LSI Logic driver version 1.20.18.0. Driver name is symmpi.sys. Hope this helps.

Dieter

Thx for your in-depth reply, Dieter.

The problem I have is that my Adaptec SCSI controller doesn't respond to the VM's driver for a Buslogic controller...with the result that neither the scanner nor the tape device are "seen" by the VM. If they were seen, then by all means I'd ID the correct device drivers for them—they both work quite well in a real-world XP installation.

Luckily, it's not the end of the world, since I can start XP by booting from a physical drive. Unfortunately, I have to cause that drive not to see my primary (Win7) drive, else all Win7 restore points are destroyed on startup. This doesn't happen when starting an XP VM, though, and I was hoping that VMLWS 4.x might allow definition of a chosen physical SCSI controller.

Shen