Ide disk

[alexpt1]

HI all

I'm newbie about Esx 3.5 techology

I've set up a esx 3.5 environment and virtualized many servers, now i've to import a IPCOP (linux 2.4 kernel) into a virtual machine; the problem is that the physycal machine had 2 IDE disks and esx doesnt't permit me to build a vm with IDE disk.

There's a way to emulate IDE disk into a esc 3.5 environment without rebuilding the complete ipcop server ?

Many thanks in advance

Bye

Alex

[Texiwill]

Hello,

IDE is not supported within ESX. You most likely have to reinstall unless VMware Converter will convert the system for you.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[virtualesxer]

I ran into the same issue with my FreeBSD machine (which was using IDE). The Converter turned out to mess things up beyond recognition (and only imported /dev/ad0s1a anyway). I soon realized I was better off just recompiling the FreeBSD kernel, this time with the SCSI stuff back in (it's always good to have a LINT hanging around somewhere). Then I made regular partition backups. Then I simply installed a clean VM, with SCSI disk. And then, from within the new VM, I restored the individual partition backups. Done!

[tpe]

If reinstalling the OS is going to be a lot of work, you can convert the existing IDE virtual disks to SCSI. There are three options I can think of.

OPTION 1) Run the vmware vdiskmanager tool against the .vmdk to convert it.

I don't think VMWare recommends this technique but it definately works. The basics are outlined here: http://hamed.dk/home/53-vm-ide2scsi but there are a few shortcuts this article doesn't mention. First, it's easiest if you upload all the files for this VM to the ESX server and do the work from the ESX server using a shell. Transfer the entire VM to the ESX server and place it in /vmfs/volumes/<VOLUME NAME>/. Now ssh to the ESX server and run the vdiskmgr commands as shown in the link above. Once you're done,use the web console (or VI) to browse the datastore on the ESX server. Find the .vmx file for the VM, right click on it, then import the VM into the console.

OPTION 2) if you have VMware workstation or VMware server you can use that environment tocopy the data from a virtual IDE disk to a virtual SCSI disk.

Put your newly created VM in that environment, create a second disk on the machine (SCSI, not IDE) and copy the data from the IDE to the SCSI disk from within the VM.

OPTION 3) Use a linux server to mount an IDE and a SCSI virtual disks and copy the data over.

http://gernot-heiser.org/~matthewc/vmdk-loop/