There seems to be a lack of information around the virtual SCSI driver in Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, or at least information that is easy to find so here are some tips on getting the most out of this driver and how it compares to the IDE driver.

• You don't have to have a physical SCSI card or SCSI hard drives to use SCSI in Virtual Server 2005.  The SCSI driver is a virtual SCSI driver for a virtual SCSI bus, it does not need to use a real SCSI card.
• The SCSI driver only has limited support.  Using this driver with non-Windows OS's may not work, or even older Windows versions.  YMMV
• There is no SCSI driver for Virtual PC. 
• The performance of the SCSI driver is very slow until you have the virtual machine additions installed.  The virtual machine additions contain the accelerated SCSI driver but you can install this driver during your setup of 2003, 2000, and XP by installing VS 2005 R2 and using the virtual floppy to load the accelerated SCSI driver or "shunt driver" during setup just as you would install any SCSI driver by using the F6 key when setup first starts.

Here are some of the advantages in using the SCSI driver and hard drives over IDE drives in your VM's.

• Clustering!
• More drives per VM - up to 28 SCSI disks
• More space per drive - up to 2 TB per driver versus 128 GB max for IDE
• They are faster!

And if you weren't confused before, in Server 2008 with Windows Server Virtualization, all of this changes. 

Here are some virtualization resources and related links:

Virtual PC Guys blog

virtualization.info home page  virtualization.info RSS feed

John Howard's blog, Senior Program Mgr, Windows Server Virtualization

Microsoft Virtualization home page

Download Windows Server 2008 RC0 

Regards,
Anthony

Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E Inc.

http://configmgr.com

© 2007 Anthony Clendenen