Sound Hardware Question

[RogerAli]

Hey all,

Got an ESX 3.0.1 Farm environment up and running. We have an application running on Win 2003 Server Std VM that requires a sound card (SB 16 Compatible) installed via Device Manager. This device is never used, the application just requires it to load and operate (Avaya software).

On VM Workstaion, we were able to do this (the system had no physical sound hardware) and everything worked fine. Does anyone know if this is possible on an ESX 3.0.1 VM, if so, how would I go about doing this?

Thanks,

Roger

[Paul_Lalonde]

I had seen a similar post that said a physical sound card was required in the ESX 3 server, but I've never tried this myself.

Paul

[virtech]

I guess you need to try and add a Multimedia Device in Add Hardware?

Have you tired that in the VM running on ESX 3?

[ErMaC1]

ESX doesn't support virtualizing sound hardware at all. In a previous thread, someone had mentioned they got this working in ESX 2.5 by editing the VMX file directly and adding in the sound card entries copied from a VMware Workstation VMX file, but that ESX3 broke this and wouldn't start the VM.

As far as I know, there's no way to add virtual sound hardware to an ESX VM at all. You might be able to use some sort of USB sound device over the network to a USBAnywhere device, but that's the closest thing to a solution I can think of. Otherwise I'm afraid you're SOL.

[Paul_Lalonde]

Well, tell that to VMware!

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=611610