Lazy virtualisation

[jpdw]

Thought I'd post this as I am sure the virtualisation post started by Neil will have got a lot of people thinking about doing similar to some degree.

Long term I'll do similar to what Neil Spelling described - clean upgraded OS, USB based PCU to connect Idranet etc,.

However, in the short term I wanted to get my existing install "lifted & shifted" onto my ESXi host so that I can power off the old dedicated machine.

I used VMWare Converter to import the old XP installation direct into ESXi - having had mixed success of this at work, I was pleased to find it "just worked". Needed a few tweaks to update network drivers and to install VMWare tools. But no more than 30 minutes work once the import had finished.

For getting Idranet's PCD connection into the new VM, I've used a USB-Serial adpater between the PCD and the HP Server's USB socket, selected in ESXi for the VM to have a virtual USB Host and the USB device. The VM now seems COM3 from the PCD. The last trick is to change the selection in Cortex's Setup/RS232 Comms option - first to select the correct COM port, second to select that it's a PCU not a PCD.

And it seems to be working!

[Paul_B]

Also remember to change the settings on the COM port as from memory the buffers want to be as small as possible. It should work as I had this working with Hyper-V. Strangely enough I'm now going back the other with Cortex running under Windows 7 on an low power machine. My virtualisation lab is on another machine which is more powerful but also consumes more watts. Cortex will control the virtualisation machine in terms of shutting down and WOL

Paul

[jpdw]

... Cortex running under Windows 7 on an low power machine...

I'd still class mine as a low power machine - though it's moved from a mini-ITX consuming about 20-25W to an HP Microserver (as the other recent threads) which, with 2 spinning HDs still only consumes ~35W. And gives me 1 Windows for Cortex along with 3 other VMs for NAS and other stuff...

Windows 7? As mentioned in my first post, eventually I'll do a rebuild rather than just import, and was wondering what OS to use. XP getting long in the tooth nowadays, so I was wondering whether it should be a Win7 flavour (probably Pro or Ent) or Win2k8 or Win8 if I provarocate long enough!

Karam.. if you're reading... what's the best option from an Idratek point of view?

[Karam]

We are actively supporting Windows 7 in the sense that Cortex does now run on this and we will seek to address issues that are discovered, whereas for example although Cortex will run on Vista we would not wish to expend effort on resolving issues specific to that. Windows 7 Pro is the flavour we work with but probably others are ok - until we find otherwise

Regarding USB com port settings, as mentioned above use the Advanced settings tab in the Com port properties (within O/S not Cortex) to get access to the latency and buffer size settings and set to 2ms and 64bytes respectively.