Comments on: Tap into vSphere PVSCSI Performance with Separate VM Boot and Data Drives

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:23:12 +0000

UPDATE: With vSphere Update 1, VMware now supports boot disks to be used with the paravitual SCSI controller !

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:23:12 +0000

UPDATE: With vSphere Update 1, VMware now supports boot disks to be used with the paravitual SCSI controller !

By: rbrambley

rbrambley — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 18:59:48 +0000

Per Scott Lowe's latest post on deciding between VMware FT or PVSCSI/VMXNET3 (you can't do both BTW) I decided to include 2 more links about the limitations of VMware FT.

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/217845
http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/vmroyale/20...
see Scott's trackback below

By: Another Reason Not to Use PVSCSI or VMXNET3 - blog.scottlowe.org - The weblog of an IT pro specializing in virtualization, storage, and servers

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 18:54:45 +0000

[...] other bloggers pointed out that PVSCSI isn’t supported for boot disks (Rich Brambley put up a really good post, for example). Rich, among others, suggested moving virtual machines back to a “two disk [...]

By: Jim S

Jim S — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:27:16 +0000

I've had great success using ghost32 from inside of a BartPE to migrate VM partitions around. It would be fairly easy to do this to go from the regular vSCSI adapter to the paravirtualized adapter. You'd just need to add a new vmdk to the server using the paravirtualized adapter, let windows detect the new adapter, install the driver, and intialize the disk. Then you reboot the server using a BartPE image that has ghost and the correct F6 SCSI drivers in it and do a partition to partition copy from the old standad SCSI adapter vmdk to the new paravirtualized SCSI adapter vmdk. In my experience this migration takes less time than using VMware Converter.

Just because we now live in a virtual world doesn't mean all the old physical tools have become meaningless.

By: David

David — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 03:24:41 +0000

You can boot off PVSCSI. You just need to tell the VM to load the drivers first. Check ou the links at the bottom of this article for Windows and Linux.

By: gork

gork — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:52:53 +0000

Why can't you boot off PVSCSI? In windows, maybe OK, but I bet you can do it in Linux no problem.

By: rbrambley

rbrambley — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 09:49:06 +0000

Vladan,

In VI3.5, if you use the vCenter Converter Enterprise you cannot
customize the new .vmdks, but if you use the latest version of the
stand alone converter you can split multiple partitions into multiple
.vmdks.

I'm not sure abut the Converter Enterprise edition of vSphere vCenter.