Serial Port on ESXi 5.1

[lucasrichardmil]

Greetings,

I have a Dell PowerEdge T620 that I loaded ESXi 5.1 with to have a second VMWare host for my school district. Due to the age of our door system I had to copy a physical host running WinXP SP3 from an old Dell Optiplex GX150 that hosted the control program. The import went well, but I can't get the virtual machine to read the phyical serial port on the VMWare host. I went under the virtual machine while it was powered off and clicked, on summary and then edit settings. Next under the hardware tab I added the serial port and told it to connect using the physical connection /dev/char/serial/uart0. There are no conflicts in the virtual machine's device manager. All I need is to get COM1 to recognize and I can close the ticket out for this project. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks,

Luke Miller

//////////UPDATE/////////

I went back and verified my BIOS settings, and the VM settings. No changes were need. I restarted everything and had the user log into the VM and access the controller. The serial port worked for her. She did everything I did and it worked!! I logged in as me again and it finally worked for me. I don't know why, but at least our door system is up and running. I am closing this ticket.

//////////////////////////////

[a_nut_in]

Firstly, is the serial port enabled on the host? Check the BIOS options to check. If it is, could you do a telnet to the VM serial port to see if communication is happening?

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.vsphere.vm_admin.doc_50/GUID-A779C84D-4324-4D32-A...

[lucasrichardmil]

Before I installed ESXi I made sure the serial port was set to COM1 in the BIOS. Are there any hardware settings I should be aware too?

[a_nut_in]

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/pet620/en/t620omen.pdf

Gives you Serial Port/System Setup options.