SCSI Tape Drive Recognized on Host but not on VM's

[ColoradoDerek]

Hello.

We are running ESXi 3.5 on a machine as its own OS (no OS on the HOST other than ESXi)

When i'm using VMWare Infrastructure, I can see the SCSI Tape Drive as "Media EXABYTE" (as seen in the attached screenshot)

But when I boot up the 2003 Server (Windows 2003 Server R2) it doesn't recognize anything at all related to tape drives or scsi drives (other than its HDD) and i'm not sure how to get it to be recognized.

I've been searching the internet for days trying to find an answer, and i've come real close with some answers but nothing ever seems to change the output in the 2003 server.

I'm sure its something I am not doing or doing wrong but I just cant figure it out.

The SCSI card we are using is an Adaptec that we specifically said needed to be compatible with ESXi and it supposedly is. I see it show up during POST and it shows up in the VMWare infrastructure program, but not in any of the VM's.

Any help would be soooo appreciated as we are running out of time to get this system working.

Our fallback will be to put the scsi tape drive on its own PC and share it through that but we'd rather not waste a entire PC just for that when we believe it will work with ESXi.

Thanks alot !!!

Derek Conlon

[RParker]

But when I boot up the 2003 Server (Windows 2003 Server R2) it doesn't recognize anything at all related to tape drives or scsi drives (other than its HDD) and i'm not sure how to get it to be recognized.

I am going to save you a lot of trouble. It can't be done. ESX cannot virtualize SCSI devices, sound, USB, PCI, Serial or Parallel ports to a VM. At least this is true for ESX 3.5x and previous.

[ColoradoDerek]

Well, i'm glad I dont give up so easily!

As it turns out (and as I suspected due to the lack of information on the internet) this WAS supposed to "just work"

I have now successfully backup up and restored from a SCSI tape drive that is connected to the host THROUGH the VM.

The only thing I did differently was press CTRL+A when i was asked if I wanted to enter the SCSI Utilities, i went in there, looked around, made no changes, exited, rebooted and presto, both 1:0 and 1:1 were located and easily installed into the 2003 Server Guest OS after it was rebooted.

I guess in the end it was just SCSI acting weird, but I finally found the right combination of "magic" to work on it during bootup and it works great now.

So i'm not sure what you mean by ESXi cant handle virtualizing SCSI devices (tape drives) but it sure seems to work for me. (as I knew it would when I stopped screwing it up)

Thanks for your response!!!!

Derek Conlon

[RParker]

So i'm not sure what you mean by ESXi cant handle virtualizing SCSI devices (tape drives) but it sure seems to work for me. (as I knew it would when I stopped screwing it up)

Well maybe there are exploits, but ESX does not pass hardware controllers to VM. Maybe because it's Adaptec, but there is no option for 'scsi' other than hard drive when you setup a VM, so maybe you got lucky.

Or maybe it's just a matter of not officially supported. . . .

There are other forums that attest to this as well, that it doesn't work, so maybe you have one of those rare cases. And ESX is designed to migrate VM's. When you try to mgirate a VM, you won't be able to because those devices are tied to a single machine, so that will prevent vmotion of VM's from operating.

so maybe stand alone it works, but in a cluster environment with more than 1 ESX host and shared storage, you will disrupt the functions of the VM by doing this.

[ColoradoDerek]

Well if I am just lucky, i'll take it!!

We really needed this to work, so however it works, as long as it works!

I just dont understand what you mean by there are no options except for HDD for SCSI when creating a VM.

You dont add it when your creating it, (at least I didn't) you add it when you add the SCSI device to the system through the "edit VM settings" area.

You can see my screenshot to see what I mean, when i first created the VM, i only had SCSI Controller 0, but when i added the Adaptec SCSI card into the server, it allowed me to highlight SCSI Device and add the tape drives, then when i did that, it automatically added SCSI Controller 1 (because the new SCSI Card was ID 1 according to the information in the POST) and then after that you can choose if you want Media EXABYTE or TAPE Exabyte.

After that, I went into Server 2003 and it showed a EXABYTE VXA-3 Sequential Device under "Unknown Devices" I right clicked on that, said "Update Drivers" and told it to use Windows Updates (the internet) just this one time and Presto, it turned it into EXABYTE VXA-3 Tape Drive located under the Tape Drives section under Device Manager. (that is the FIRST TIME that "use windows update to find the drivers" has EVER worked for me!!)

It probably does have something to do with it being Adaptec, becuase they are known for being compatible with VMWare stuff (according to other posts i've read while looking for this solution) but whatever it is, i dont think its a bug or that i'm abusing some code or something.

I'm fairly confident this is by design and could be easily duplicated with anyone if they use Adaptec SCSI controllers. ( I cant speak for non-adaptec ones)

Thanks again for all your information!!!

EDIT: You edited your post while I was typing this post. All that new information about clusters and migrating VM's and such, your probably right about that, I have no clue. We are only concerned with it working in a stand alone environement because only one computer needs to access that SCSI Tape Library. Thanks again!!