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a quick one - what driver for workstation?

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sabregen

sabregen

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looking for what driver vmware workstation requires when you do a local disk passthrough. Config as follows:

win2k3 vm
1vcpu
512mb ram
1 nic
no sound
no usb
no floppy
no serial
primary drive = .VMDK IDE, 80gb thin provisioned
secondary drive = physical SATA drive. Drive passthrough on device (not partition)

the secondary drive is showing up as SCSI, which is fine...but what SCSI driver do I need? I can't seem to get the physical drive recognized.
 
cannot install guest, is the problem, so no... no tools. Intended VM guest is WHS. 80GB thin provisioned system disk, and secondary disk as passthrough.

I need to get this to work so that I can run a WHS repair installation, instead of building a new WHS. I have tried the following drivers, with no luck:

VMWare BusLogic SCSI
LSI Logic SCSI (parallel)
LSI Logic SAS

all 3 drivers were for Win2k3 OS. none worked. Installer does not see the secondary drive.
 
install it first, then install tools, then add the second disk?

Honest question: What's the appeal of WHS? I've never seen the point to the thing... just set up 2k3 or 2k8 :p
 
it's the way that it deals with storage that makes it appealing, plus, baremetal restores, no RAID adapters required (so no OCE, RLM issues to deal with). Hot add/remove drives from the storage pool. No brainer-folder duplication. It lets me focus on other things than data management.

cannot add the disk after the install, or I have to start from scratch. if I start from scratch, there's no non-destructive way to bring my data into the new WHS, without doing a copy back operation...which I am trying to avoid.
 
How does it deal with the storage (serious question still).

I think the direct drive access requires the service in the VM (mount service) to work, hence the tools. This may not be possible.
 
Well crap. Was worth a shot. as for how WHS deal with storage, I will give you a for instance:

80GB install drive - Gets chopped by installer into 20GB system, and 60GB as the start of the storage pool. If you add another drive to the machine, it will show up in the Admin Console, and be available to add to the pool. WHS basically appends the previous 60GB partition with the partition on the new drive. It continues to do this as you add drives. That is not terribly awesome, by itself. However, drives can also be removed from the storage pool. This si a simple point and click operation. When initiated, all of the data is moved off of the drive in question onto other drives in the pool. The drive is then unmapped from the partition, and is safe to remove without disrupting the machine.

WHS also provides (through "connector software" installation on all clients) the ability to back up entire client machines, specific directories (user specified), user profiles, whatever. This can come in handy when someone shitcans the wrong file on their local disk. They just go to their connector software and restore the file from the last backup. They can also change their backup policy, username, password, and backup retention policy through this interface. Installing connector software also gives them a niec and neat shortcut on their desktop directly to the shares they have access to. Client machines that are backed up with the connector software can also be bare metal restored by inserting a bootCD on the client machine, and just selecting what machine, and which backup to restore the machine to.

There's no need for RAID controllers. WHS manages the data sets. No worries of OCE, RLM, none of that. Additionally, because there's no RAID controller needed, you're free to connect drives of any size or topology type to the machine. SATA, SAS, IDE, USB, eSATA...WHS doesn't care. Of additional interest is folder duplication. Have data that you don't want to lose? Turn on folder duplication and WHS maintains the data on two spindles at all times to make sure that if it's important, and the drive fails, you don't lose it.

The reason that I need to do a restore, and need passthrough is because unless I do a restore, I will have to build a new WHS, and lose all of my previous permissions, backups, shares, etc. The data will still be on the drive, but I will have to copy it off, nuke the drive by adding it to the storage pool, and then copying back after the drive has been added to the storage pool. The inability to do physical disk passthrough in Workstation or ESX (without tools installation) means that the only viable platform to virtualize WHS is Hyper-V on 2k8...fuck that.

The appeal of virtualizing WHS is that the system drive becomes portable, and easy to backup, and no longer reliant on real hardware (and therefor can be easily migrated without having to do a recovery installation). Making a spare copy of the .VMDK system drive to another spindle would be ideal...alas...you can't write code, can you?

:)
 
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