Trying to understand ESXi serial port

[EricBates]

I am having mixed results configuring a physical serial port to pass thru to VM.

We are running ESXi 4.1 on HP Prolient DL 180 G6 machines. They each have a single physical serial port.

I have a reliable cisco console connected to the phyiscal port for testing. Simple 9600-8-N-1 config. I am using SecureCRT 6.1 to connect to the com ports from within the Windows VMs. Sometimes I successfully connect to the cisco console. More often I simply have an unresponsive terminal. I can discover no working pattern to figure out why it sometimes works.

When I create a serial port in the VM settings, how do I know which com receives the connection in the VM? The first one created is simply called "Serial1" and subsequent ones are numbered incrementally. Is it the case that "Serial1" ==> Com1? and Serial2 ==> Com2? There is a checkbox available in the VMWare Tools "devices" tab; but that's all it is: a checkbox.

All the VMs appear to all have a com1, com2 and parallel port regardless of what the hypervisor is presenting to the VM. Presumably Windows should have no serial ports unless one is configured, discover "new" hardware when the Serial is created in ESXi and still only have one?

When I create serial ports, it appears that I can connect as many as I wish to the physical /dev/char/serial/uart0 device. This doesn't make sense to as there should be contention for the port?

Is there any testing/debugging I can do at the hypervisor level? When the config fails it is frustrating to have nothing more informative than a blank terminal window.

Thanks for your time.

[mcowger]

Have you considered using the IP serial port redirectioN?

[weinstein5]

I would second Matt's suggestion because with IP Based Serial hus you will not lose the ability to vMotion like you would if you use the serial port on the ESXi host -

[EricBates]

Yah. I think that might be a good solution. What products are available? Is the protocol standardized somehow? We only need one or two ports and the only recommended IP devices I've see are the Avocent Cyclades ACS 6000 which has 48. Can I use any old serial - IP widget?

[mcowger]

ESX has a specific method builtin for this.

Theres are models out there for VMware specifically, but here's an open source / free one called vSPC.py (google it).

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

I would take a look at Digi.com they make a number of IP based serial hubs alond with IP based USB h bs