Yesterday we had an internal discussion about the support of PVSCSI in combination with a 64bit OS. VMware’s documentation currently states the following:
Paravirtual SCSI adapters are supported on the following guest operating systems:
Windows Server 2008
Windows Server 2003
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5
As we normally spell out every single detail this KB article is kind of ambiguous in my opinion. To clarify it, both 32bit and 64bit versions of the detailed operating systems are currently supported (vSphere 4.0). One thing to note though is that there are still limitations, for instance booting a Linux guest from a disk attached to a PVSCSI adapter is currently not supported.
Booting a Windows 2003 OS with a PVSCSI adapter is supporter ? Couldn’t be that easy is it ?
I was wondering if anyone had any issues with Linux 64bit and PVSCSI?
We run a lot of RHEL 5 64bit VM’s and experienced SCSI errors (resulting in either aa VM hanging or ext3 going readonly to dataloss) under very specific and very difficult to recreate conditions, we suspect one of the conditions is when the shared SAN storage issues a queue full condition. We did log a call with VMware, but at the time no one else had the issue and we could not recreate the issue so the call was closed. One thing to note was that Windows VM’s running either PVSCSI or normal SCSI drivers and RHEL 5 64 bit hosts with normal SCSI drivers where unaffected. We saw the problem on a couple of VM’s spread over a couple of nodes in the same cluster. As such we have decided to wait for PVSCSI to mature a little more.
It would be interesting to hear if anyone else had any issues with PVSCSI on linux? (We are currently running PVSCSI on Windows only)
I actually have a lot of experience with this. Yes, windows 2003 is supported and it isn’t hard. On a full ESX system in the vmimages folder/floppies you can get the floppy needed for when you F6 during setup. Actually its on ESXi too in the same place, but that requires using tech support mode, so use at your own peril. Windows 2008 also needs a floppy with the driver at setup, including R2. For existing systems, you can easily inject the driver on supported OSes (you need the current VMTools installed). If you simply switch the SCSI controller from LSI/Buslogic to paravirtual without injecting the driver first, the VM will not boot (BSOD). There are scripts available on the interwebs for doing this, or you can just add a second scsi controller with the paravirtual driver and a vdisk that will be deleted later. Boot up once, let the driver load, and then take it down again. Remove the newly added paravirtual controller and disk and switch the original SCSI controller to paravirtual. It should boot fine.
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Looks like this KB http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1017652&sliceId=1&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&dialogID=108765735&stateId=0%200%20108767071 mentions that vSphere 4.1 has made performance changes that make pvscsi suitable for lower iop vm’s. This isn’t discussed in the release notes though. Anyone (Duncan) have anymore info on this? Can I use pvscsi adapters for all types of workloads now?
let me come back on this….
There is more to this than what meets the eye, I added the second disk and changed the adaptor to pvscsi, all is well. Powered down, changed my primary adaptor for the boot disk to pvscsi and it won’t boot. I’m using w2003 sp2 32 bit enterprise… no luck.. booted back into OS using the lsi parrelell and saw that the pvscsi was installed and working for the data drive.. I friend of mine said he is experiencing the same issue, can’t boot to the pvscsi.. however, a 3rd colleague did it fine with the same procedure and none of us can figure out what the difference could be… any suggestions would be very helpful.
Not sure how many of you out there are actually trying this method of installing an additional disk with the pvscsi adaptor hoping they can then power down and change the system disk adaptor to pvscsi – I have done this time and time again with only 1 success out of many attempts.. If anyone can shed light on this issue that would be great. I have read a few posts out there that claim this works, but my feeling is they haven’t tested it that thoroughly. I have even tried uninstalling the parallel adaptor in device manager first then powering down and adding the pvscsi and the OS still wouldn’t boot. the F6 method is currently the only method I’ve had in getting the OS to boot.