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SCSI Devices
SCSI support is visible to a guest operating system running in a virtual
machine in two ways:
- Through
a host bus adapter that provides an interface to a virtual SCSI bus
- Through
a set of virtual SCSI devices that reside on SCSI bus
The SCSI support in VMware Workstation implements a BusLogic BT-958 device as the host
bus adapter.
The BusLogic adapter that Workstation implements was selected because its design
lends itself to efficient support in the virtual machine and because device
driver support is present in all supported guest operating systems.
Generic SCSI gives a guest operating system direct access to a SCSI device
connected to the host computer. In theory, generic SCSI is completely device
independent, but it is sensitive to the guest operating
system, device class and specific SCSI hardware.
The following are known problems with SCSI support:
- Booting
from a SCSI raw disk is experimental. While booting from a SCSI raw disk may
work, it is possible there will be incompatibilities between your SCSI adapter
and the BusLogic adapter Workstation implements.
- SCSI
CD-ROM devices configured as SCSI drives for a virtual machine are not bootable. You must configure
your physical CD-ROM device as an IDE CD-ROM in the virtual machine in order to
boot from the CD-ROM (for example, you must boot from the CD-ROM device when installing an operating system).
- There
are known problems with using SCSI CD-ROM devices with a SuSE Linux 6.3 guest operating system.
For virtual machines running SuSE Linux 6.3 as a guest operating system, configure a virtual
CD-ROM drive as an IDE CD-ROM device rather than a SCSI CD-ROM device.
- The
BIOS setup identifies SCSI devices only in the Boot screen.
- The
BusLogic BTFDISK utility does not work correctly. Use the normal FDISK utility
to partition SCSI disks (however, be aware that it works only on units 0 and
1).
- SuSE
Linux 6.2 does not include BusLogic support in the base distribution. You need
to manually configure it when installing SuSE Linux 6.2 as a guest operating system within
a virtual machine. This issue may also affect
other distributions.
- SCSI
is not supported with Solaris guest operating systems. Solaris uses 24-bit
command control block (CCB) structures, which are not supported in this release
of Workstation.
- Windows 98 first edition cannot be installed from a virtual SCSI CD-ROM drive (this is
a Windows problem). For virtual machines that will run Windows 98 as a guest operating system,
configure the virtual CD-ROM device as an IDE device instead.
- FreeBSD cannot be installed onto a virtual SCSI hard disk. For virtual machines that
will run FreeBSD as the guest operating system, configure the virtual hard disk as an IDE device
instead.
- Windows XP cannot be installed onto a SCSI hard disk because it does not have the
necessary BusLogic driver. For virtual machines that will run Windows XP as a guest
operating system, configure the virtual hard disk as an IDE device instead.
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