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jacobgj
Contributor
Contributor

Moving from BusLogic to LSI Logic Controller

Okay to make a long story short, here is my dilema.

I have converted all of my physical machines into virtual machines and everything works great. We began to run into performance issues and was told that we should get our Win2K3 servers off the Bus Logic controller and over to the LSI Logic controller. I have searched the communities and everyone has said that I just need to change the type and voila it works. But, it doesn't!! It just tries to boot and blue screens over and over. I have a case open with VMware, but they are taking their sweet time in getting a solution and I think the person is new. Anyways, I have figured out how to add an LSI controller to my VM along with the Bus Logic, but I'm guessing it needs a disk in order for it to show up in Windows. Does anyone have a better solution or know how to specify in the .vmx file what controller a disk is mounted to? I'm using ESX 3.5 U4 any help would be appreciated.

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AlbertWT
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Hi Jacob,

If the OS has been installed and running with Bus Logic and running fine with it,changing the SCSI controller would make it BSoD as the OS doesn't recognized the SCSI controller vHardware anymore.

During my first install, i use LSI Logic parallel for my Windows Server 2003 and it works fine, but for my Windows Server 2008 i use LSI logic SAS. and don't forget to install the VMWare tool once you've done with creating the VM.

Kind Regards,

AWT

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PaScKM
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

You could try this:

1. Start the Server with BusLogic

2. Open Hardware from the Settings Menu

3. Choose to add new hardware (which is already installed)

4. Manual Choose Hardware -> SCSI&Raid Controller -> Vmware Inc. -> LSI Logic

5. After install shutdown Windows

6. Change SCSI Controller and start VM again

If this doesnt work, you can only make an repair install of windows 2003 to get the drivers in there.

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jacobgj
Contributor
Contributor

I've tried to "pre-install" the drivers before I swapped the controller and it didn't work. I have found a way to edit the .vmx file so I now show a Bus Logic and an LSI Logic controller, but the LSI isn't showing up in the Device Manager. I wonder if I need to mount a disk to it. Any ideas how? Because these were physical machines and we converted them, they ended up with the BusLogic. I wouldn't have used them, but I wasn't given an option to use the LSI controller.

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ThompsG
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Evening,

Yes it is quite annoying that when you do the P2V the default SCSI controller is the BusLogic one, however Windows 2003 has a built in driver for the LSI controller so therefore should just pick it up after changing the SCSI controller type in virtual machine properties. This was the case when we virtualized our datacenter (250+ P2V's). Since this is obviously not working in your case then the other thing you can do is to using Bart PE and add the Fix-VMSCSI () plugin in order to load the drivers into your Windows 2003 machine. This does two things at once: loads the LSI driver and modifies the registry of Windows to boot from it.

Yell if you need any further instructions otherwise I trust this helps.

Kind regards,

Glen

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WadeG
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Jacob,

Not sure if this is still a problem for you or not. But what I have done several times successfully is to add another scsi disk as SCSI ID 1:0 which will add a new scsi controller. It will pick busloigic be default, boot the vm let it see the deivce etc. shut it down and then change the secondary scsi controller to LSI, boot it up let it install the driver etc. once it's alll good, take it down again and switch the primary type to LSI, boo tit up and Viola!

you can now remove the temp harddrive and controller.

Also make sure you snapshot vm before hand as fallback...

HTH,

Wade

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Leifster
Contributor
Contributor

I agree with Wade's solution. You can find a knowledge base article documenting the process here:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1002149&sl...

Scott Lowe also talked about using the same technique during the vSphere VM upgrade after upgrading to virtual hardware 7 and wanting to take advantage of the pvscsi controller for non-boot drives.

http://blog.scottlowe.org/2009/06/01/vsphere-virtual-machine-upgrade-process/

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