Hello,
We have VMWare ESX 4.1, 260247 installed on 3 servers and utilize vSphere 4.1 to manage them. I ran VMWare convertor and brought in a new machine which requires the use of a Serial Port to program our security system card access. I'd rather keep this in the VM Environment so it's one less box in the server room gulping up power and taking up space. Basically there is a program on it that we can add/remove/modify employees door access levels, and it uploads these changes over a serial connection to a box that is connected to our security system. The machine doesn't even need to be on for the door access to work, but we leave it on 24/7 anyway incase we need to make a change.
So I understand that I won't be able to VMotion this VM if its tied to a physical port on it's host, but that's OK. Our hosts are Dell R710 servers 2x Xeon X5560 CPU at 2.8 GHz and 32GB RAM. They only have one RS-232 port on the back, and I connected a serial extension cable to it that runs over to the rack where the little box is that interfaces the security system to a serial cable. I connected this up and in the VM settings I mapped Serial Port 1 to physical serial port /dev/ttyS0 and Serial Port 2 to /dev/ttyS1. I know the host only has 1 serial port, but since ttyS0 wasn't working, I figured I'd add both.
So on the VM itself, I open Hyperterminal and tried both COM1 and COM2 with the same exact settings as the original machine (19200,8,None,1,None) but I get no data on the screen. The software does not push any changes to the system either. In the VM's settings I also tried the Yield CPU on poll option and that didn't seem to make a difference. By the way what is that for?
Is there any way to see if it's possible to physically map a serial port? I ensured that this VM was on the correct server. Originally it was not, but I VMotioned it over to the correct one, then reconfigured the Serial Ports.
Thanks for your assistance. Maybe there's a low level test I can log into the hosts command line and at least see if there is any communication out that port. I could also vmotion machines off of this host so I can power it down and poke around in the BIOS. Let me know what you think.