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 GSX Server implements a BusLogic BT-958™ device as the host bus adapter.

The BusLogic adapter that VMware GSX Server 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 may be incompatibilities between your SCSI adapter and the BusLogic adapter VMware GSX Server 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 VMware GSX Server.
Windows 98 first edition cannot be installed from a virtual SCSI CD-ROM drive (this is a Windows problem). For virtual machines that run Windows 98 as a guest operating system, configure the virtual CD-ROM device as an IDE device instead.
FreeBSD 4.3 or earlier cannot be installed onto a virtual SCSI hard disk. For virtual machines that run FreeBSD 4.3 or earlier 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 run Windows XP as a guest operating system, configure the virtual hard disk as an IDE device instead.

SCSI Devices

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