SCO Openserver 5.0.6 on ESXi 4.1

[KevinGB]

I am planning to implement SCO Openserver 5.0.6 on ESXi 4.1.

I have two initial questions. The first is what type of virtual hard drive to use. It would appear to me that it is better to go for IDE (so long as I don't need a virtual hard drive larger than 128GB) because that would avoid any potential problems with SCSI busy errors. Am I correct?

Secondly I need to decide what type of virtual ethernet card to use. The VMware documentation says I must use E1000 "because SCO Open Server 5.0 does not include suitable network drivers." However, the Flexible card works with the SCO PNT driver for AMD PCNet-PCI from ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/openserver5/drivers/OSR506/network/pnt/ and this combination appears to be much more reliable than using the 5.0.6 eeG driver with E1000. There is a version of the eeG driver for 5.0.7 at ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/openserver5/507/drivers/eeG_5.1.2/ which installs and works on 5.0.6 and which does seems to be much more reliable than the version for 5.0.6 at ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/openserver5/drivers/OSR506/network/eeG/. However, the PNT driver with the Flexible adapter seems to be slightly faster and from a gut feel I think it is still more reliablethan eeG/E1000. The thing is, I don't really want to do an installation which goes against VMware documentation that tells me to use the eeG driver with E1000. Can anybody help me with my decision? Is anybody using Flexible/PNT on 5.0.6 in a production environment?

[DSTAVERT]

Welcome to the Communities.

I would follow the recommendations as a start. I would test whatever you want to end up using. I would choose SCSI rather than IDE. Test, test, test. Especially if this will be high load VM then measurable testing will be the only way to determine the ideal direction in your particular environment.

Forum Upgrade Notice - We will be upgrading VMware Communities systems between 10-12 December 2010. During this time, the system will be placed in READ-ONLY mode.

[KevinGB]

So you would test, test, test and then follow the recommendations even though your testing suggested that the recommendations were wrong?

Why would you choose SCSI over IDE when there are documented problems on SCO Openserver with VMware's use of SCSI Busy?

[DSTAVERT]

I would use the recommendations as a start. Install using whatever you decide on and then test using your application and use scenario. Since your ESXi host platform will be different from my ESXi host platform, what I choose may not be what you ultimately choose and what actually performs better for you based on your testing. Not all physical SCSI controllers perform the same. Not all physical NICs perform the same. The differences in how the physical performs will affect how the virtual performs.

Forum Upgrade Notice - We will be upgrading VMware Communities systems between 10-12 December 2010. During this time, the system will be placed in READ-ONLY mode.

[KevinGB]

I appreciate your replies but I really need somebody with experience of SCO Openserver who can answer my specific points.

[DSTAVERT]

Ask any question and there will be many answers. No two people will have the same hardware and so no two installations will perform the same.

Have a search through the forums for SCO openserver. Not much activity so I wouldn't count on too many responses from SCO openserver 5 experts and ESXi 4.1. If you want good information you will need to get it through your own testing.

Forum Upgrade Notice - We will be upgrading VMware Communities systems between 10-12 December 2010. During this time, the system will be placed in READ-ONLY mode.

[KevinGB]

Again, I do appreciate you taking the trouble to reply. However, I've spent hours trawling through this and other forums and doing testing. I'm now looking for somebody who has been in a similar situation with SCO Openserver that I can share information and ideas with.

[DSTAVERT]

Languish away.

Forum Upgrade Notice - We will be upgrading VMware Communities systems between 10-12 December 2010. During this time, the system will be placed in READ-ONLY mode.

[KevinGB]

If there was an 'unhelpful answer' button I would now be clicking it.

[KevinGB]

So where do people who 'do' SCO Openserver hang out?!

[JakkalsKruger]

Hi,

I'm sure you've answered your own questions by now, but I'll add my two cents non the less.

The E1000 driver works perfectly and the performance looks birlliant, but note that we have a very small user base.

In regard to the SCSI / IDE question - I suggest you use the IDE emulation as this works without issues, and you get the performance benefit of your underlying storage anyway.

Regards,

Jacques

[KevinGB]

I went for Flexible ethernet with the Pnt driver and IDE disks with the wd supplement. I took a cpio backup of the physical system using cpio to a SCSI DAT drive. I connected a similar SCSI DAT drive to an Adaptec SCSI controller in the VMware server and setup SCSI passthru to the SCO image as LSI Logic Parallel SCSI. On VMware I used a bootable CD image to restore the tape from the physical server to the virtual server. I created the bootable CD image on 5.0.6 (running under VMware) using a version of /usr/lib/mkdev/fd created by comparing the 5.0.7 version to the 5.0.6 version and incorporating the changes described at http://wdb1.sco.com/kb/showta?taid=127407 this needed a version of mkisofs which I took from ftp://ftp2.sco.com/pub/skunkware/osr5/fileutil/cdrecord/cdrecord-1.8a19-VOLS.tar