AHCI in Workstation 6.5 BIOS

[wizard2277]

Hi All!

I've been using various flavors of Workstation for a

while with great success. However, up until this

point, I have always installed a guest OS into

Workstation by installing from scratch. Now, I'd

like to take the next step and virtualize an existing

physical Unix machine. I have been able to get the

virtual machine into Workstation 6.5, but it won't

boot because it was built with SATA drives using

"AHCI".

I have been all through the Workstation BIOS that

comes up when you boot the virtual machine, but

I have been unable to find any setting for "AHCI".

Hence, my question: is there a setting in the BIOS

somewhere where I can set "AHCI" for my virtual

SATA drive so that the OS will see an AHCI drive

and boot? If not, is it possible to patch Workstation

or the BIOS to use AHCI?

I apologize if this question has been covered

elsewhere, but I've done a lot of searching and

the only references that I could find to AHCI

pertained to settings in a physical machine.

Feel free to email me directly.

Thanks for your help,

C. Coulter

wizard2277@hotmail.com

[Ken_Cline]

Moved to the Workstation forum...

Ken Cline

Technical Director, Virtualization

Wells Landers

TVAR Solutions, A Wells Landers Group Company

VMware Communities User Moderator

[ddeml]

Actually, i would not only be interested in having an option to configure ahci in a vmware bios, but actually able to use ncq features in vmware. my host system already supports ncq with a queue depth of up to 64. it would be very cool to benefin ftom the same performance gain in the vm for obvious reasons. beside ram shortage, hard disk ist the most notable bottheneck when working with vmware.

[continuum]

Hi

your worries are moot.

Virtual machines either uses IDE or Buslogic or LSI-logic or LSI-SAS controllers.

You never have SATA drives in a VM - thats why you do not need to worry about AHCI-settings

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description of vmx-parameters:

VMware-liveCD:

[ksc]

Right. VMware does not have a virtual AHCI device. There has been little need, as any benefit AHCI provides is provided moreso by SCSI. (To date, the only known use case for an AHCI device is P2V of machines that only installed AHCI drivers.)

On your physical machine, try to install drivers for LSILogic and configure your VM to provide a SCSI controller with SCSI disks instead.

SCSI has been doing command tagging for a long time; I would be very surprised if NCQ had any advantages at all over a full SCSI implementation. Looking at our LSI implementation, queue depth appears to be 128 (but I'm not an expert on our SCSI code).

[ddeml]

My host is a CLEVO D900C, which has an ICH8R chipset and three SATA hard disks connected to it. I run it in AHCI-Mode (not RAID mode). Because its a notebook, i have no chance to install an scsi-driver. however, windows 7 (and vista) (both x86 and x64) supports this chipset natively and uses ncq. I dont know another driver for windows 7 (or vista) and the ICH8R chipset.

With the native driver and the vmdk's connected with an LSIlogic interface to the guest. but the guest operating system never has a queue depth > 1which let me assume that the vmware scsi device implementation does not enabe queueing - or i am too stupid to find a setting.

is there a way to configure the host, the guest, the vmware scsi device emulation, or something else, so that the guest can have a command queue, and that the operations are attepted to be parallelized on the host system as well?

[danIme]

SAS controllers command SATA drives as well.

[danIme]

VMware SCSI controller or whatever controller belonging to it, virtual ones, they are working with a file which file depends by the host operating mode, ncq or not, so to me seems to have no sens to implement ncq to a virtual system. NCQ helps when you read/write to a physical disk not to a logical file.