VMware Cloud Community
Mautje
Contributor
Contributor

How many physical serial ports are supported by ESX4.1

I'm trying to enable a 4 serial port PCI adapter (Lava Computer mfg Inc Quattro-PCI A) on ESX4.1

I've been able to enable the 4 ports by using both

setpci and setserial commands

After this I've got 4 enabled ports but strangely only one can be connected to a guest system. The others are reported as not being a serial port when trying to connect.

After this try I enable the onboard serial port en configured ttyS0 to be autoconfigured. This enabled the onboard serial port. but left me with only 3 out of 4 available ports on the PCI card.

I just skipped enabling the last highest IO adress, strangely all 4 ports can be connected but only the modem connected to the onboard serial port is detected.

I thought that it might be caused by the missing serial port so I tried adding ttyS4, tried both .MAKEDEV and mknod, I get a 5th ttyS but when trying to set it I get the message: /dev/ttyS4: No such device or address

Linux Kernels starting from 2.6 appear to have only 4 serial ports available by default but am not sure if ESX has the same limitations.

I haven't been able to find any article which clearly states a maximum number of serial port regarding the host/

Anyone an idea?

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HannaL
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Have you confirmed with the hardware vendor of your server that this device is supported by the server?  They also may have documentation on configuration.

I typically don't see customers use the serial ports and it can cause some problems with conversion of phsyical to virtual vm's, usually it is recommended to remove those if they are not needed. But technically it should work.  I would check with the hardware vendor of the device itself.  Also remember that ESX is not Linux.

Hope that helps, Hanna --- BSCS, VCP2, VCP VI3, VCP vSphere, VCP 5 https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/vmware-support-ibm
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Mautje
Contributor
Contributor

Hi Hanna,

No explicit support on ESX. The server used to be running Windows with VMWare player which was ok. But to minimize overhead and maximize performance we decided to give ESX a try with the card.

I'm also familiar with the existance of various serial over IP solutions but we also have QNX machines which might have trouble with serial over IP.

The solution needs to be as low cost as possible (what else is new Smiley Wink)

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