Adding Physical HDD ESXi - vmware

I've got an install of ESXi 4.1 running on my server, I also have a external network HDD that stores all my music/images etc, I've tried adding the HDD to the server, the disk is recognized by ESXi/VSphere, but its telling me I have to format the disk in order to use it.
Is this correct? I what to be able to add this HDD to an existing VM as a 2nd HDD, so then I can map the drive and share it on my network. Is this possible without wiping?
Thanks,
james.

Where is the message comming from the VM guest operating system or ESXi?
What guest operating system are you using?
You should not need to format the hard disk to work in a guest VM if it has already been formatted with NTFS or FAT32 etc..
ESXi 4.1 supports pass-through for USB devices. Please check http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/documentLinkInt.do?externalId=1022290 and http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/documentLinkInt.do?externalID=1021345 for support details on USB devices.

Related

How to install SCO Open server in the cloud?

I need to install unix sco open server 5.0.5 in the cloud, does anyone have any idea how to do that?
I really hope you can help me, thank you.
SCO OpenServer 5.0.5 was released in 1999. I seriously doubt that it would be possible to run that old of an OS in Google Cloud. Installation would not be possible directly in the cloud. You would need to install it first to Hyper-V or VMware and then upload the VHD/VMDK.
Another issue for systems that old is the disk device drivers have assumptions about the BIOS and disk geometry. Back then 8 GB disks were large. Today a 10 GB disk is the bare minimum in most situations. Even if you could import a VHD/VMDK I do not believe it will boot. I wrote SCO OpenServer disk and RAID device drivers. Each time a new disk drive came out, we had to make changes to the disk tables to handle the new geometry, parameters, etc.

Can I run Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Amazon WorkSpaces?

I use Dragon dictation software including by using it over a remote access to my home computer. I also once had it set up on the network server computer at a client site which I could also access when logged in remotely. But now, I have a situation where my access to work info is over Amazon WorkSpaces. Does anyone know if Dragon Pro can be installed on and accessed through an Amazon WorkSpace desktop?
TIA!!
Your question was bugging me for a long time, finally I gave in and rented a WorkSpace and tried Dragon.
Recognition for me is totally fine as long as your local computer's standard audio input device is actually the one you want to use Dragon with. If your default input device is the built-in micro of your laptop, computer or screen, recognition will most likely be bad. I used a Sennheiser MB Pro 2 with a USB dongle on a Windows machine for testing, as well as a TravelMike with a USB MultiAdapter. Both work fine.
As for factors that influence recognition quality:
I know from other virtualization/remote desktop solutions that the codec that transfers your speech to the virtual/remote machine may work well for one microphone, and not for others. Try a different mike and see if that improves your recognition.
In order to rule out microphone issues, I suggest trying different internet connections (WiFi, Ethernet, tethering, different internet providers). Missing words from speech recognition over remote connections can indicate unstable or slow internet.
As far as I know, there is no way to patch a USB device through to the remote WorkSpaces machine. What you could try is install a VPN on the remote machine and use your smartphone as a remote microphone in Dragon. Your smartphone also needs the VPN. If you get that to work, recognition should be as good as on your local network, given that internet connection is fast and stable enough.

Does VMWare Workstation/Player allow multiple kernel images?

I am planning to use VMWare workstation for installing linux. But my use case is to have multiple kernel versions as part of development requirement.
Does VMWare allow use of this?
I mean will GRUB or loader prompt me for loading of kernel of my choice the way which it will do on actual system ?
Thanks, kedar
Yes, it will allow this. Linux does not care if it is running in a VM or on real hardware. As far as Linux knows (except for the VMWare tools, of course), it is running on real hardware.
The VM "disk" is just a file on the host file system so can be set up independently of that host file system, including boot loaders and such.
Vmware workstation mimics a true hardware installation very well, almost everything you can do in a physical box you can do in a virtual machine. It's not perfect but it is pretty close to it. I use a 2 physical machine setup to mimic a 10 machine domain lab. The ability to save snapshots or to pause a machine makes it better than a physical machine in some respects.
It is a great tool and one that I recommend for anyone learning IT

Linux as a guest on MacOS X: VirtualBox or Parallels?

I'm going to develop mostly Django sites on a MacBook Pro and would like to use Ubuntu VMs for testing purposes.
Which product is better suited for this purpose?
Can I connect to the VM via TCP/IP (so I can have apache running on the VM and access it from Safari on my MBP)?
Thanks!
It should be possible using VMWARE FUSION. It has a good network management, and you should be able to access easily your vm via network.
I've successfully used both VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion for this. On both systems, you can set the guest up so that it has its own IP address, and connect to it via HTTP, SSH and even native file sharing, so you can mount the guest's drive as a network drive from the Mac, and vice versa. This makes it possible to do the editing on the Mac in eg Textmate, but run the server on the VM.
I can only tell you about my experiences with a Core2Quad Q6600 on VMWare Fusion 3.0. I have three boot partitions on this system (ahem yes it is a hackintosh running with the E-Fix USB).
So i can do performance measurements. I use it for sometimes very large compiler sessions. And the amazing fact was that Linux as a Guest runs without any measureable time difference on virtualised and native Linux. Windows7 on the other hand only runs with 40% on my machine and GUI is allmost non useable while the GNOME Desktop from latest Ubuntu still works fine.
Check this out. Virtual Box is free so there is nothing to loose.

which vmware server is a better choice and which host OS (for QE)

we are setting up new QE testing server. I guess host OS will be win2008
Which vmware server to choose - 1.x or 2.x ?
A year ago I tried vmware 1 server with Win2008 and it did not work at all.
However, Vmware server 2 did not seem to have the handy vmware console
VMware Server Console\vmware.exe
(is the new vmware server2 still just web based?)
we have a lot of vmware 1 images, are these ok for v2?
Or is it just better to go with HyperV?
Hyper-V Server or ESXi would probably be the best performing and most trouble free options - ie virtualisation not really dependant on the host operating system (but still free).
You can use tools like Vmdk2Vhd to convert image files. Be aware that you should boot the image in its old format first and uninstall vmware tools and some drivers like specific disk controller drivers (as per the instructions of the tool) before you convert it.
Going the enterprise route the System Center Virtual Machine Manager can do this mostly automatically, but then it's not a free solution anymore :) This platform can of course also do physical to virtual migrations for you...
...but alas, you can prepare a physical machine the same way as before converting a vmware image and then use normal imaging tools to clone it into a virtual machine. Or you can use Vmware's free converter tool and then convert the resulting vmdk image to vhd :)
Vmware Server v2 can use v1 images. Windows Server 2008 is supported only in v2. v2 also includes the Virtual Infrastructure Client which you can use instead of the web access ( the client replaces the old console from v1). This is the same client that is used with ESX.
vmware 2.0 crashed regularly on one server I have - however, hasn't crashed since the recent 2.0.1 update (but its only been a week).
I have w2K8 running under vmware 1.0.9 - by selecting Vista (experimental) as the OS setting. However, it's not under any load yet.
I'd recommend ESXi over VMware Server (you can migrate the images) purely for performance reasons. Server 2008 and Vista both run abysmally under VMware Server from my experience. With ESXi and a decent hardware RAID setup, things can be a bit more bearable.