SCO

Hi all, I'm looking for some friendly advice on running Openserver 5.0.6 on VMware. Does anybody fancy answering a few questions if I post them?

---------- Post updated at 02:14 PM ---------- Previous update was at 10:43 AM ----------

Well people are reading my post, so I'll try my questions!

I am planning to implement SCO Openserver 5.0.6 on ESXi 4.1.

I have two initial questions. The first is what type of virtual hard drive to use. It would appear to me that it is better to go for IDE (so long as I don't need a virtual hard drive larger than 128GB) because that would avoid any potential problems with SCSI busy errors. Am I correct?

Secondly I need to decide what type of virtual ethernet card to use. The VMware documentation says I must use E1000 "because SCO Open Server 5.0 does not include suitable network drivers." However, the Flexible card works with the SCO updated PNT driver for AMD PCNet-PCI and this combination appears to be much more reliable than using the 5.0.6 eeG driver with E1000. There is a version 5.1.2 of the eeG driver for 5.0.7 which installs and works on 5.0.6 and which does seems to be much more reliable than the version that SCO list for 5.0.6. However, the PNT driver with the Flexible adapter seems to be slightly faster and from a gut feel I think it is still more reliable than eeG/E1000. The thing is, I don't really want to do an installation which goes against VMware documentation that tells me to use the eeG driver with E1000. I have found a blog entry called "HOWTO SCO P2V in the real life" which starts off by saying use Intel but then has a note saying Flexible Ethernet works too and "seems to work faster," which would agree with my findings. Can anybody help me with my decision? Is anybody using Flexible/PNT with 5.0.6 on VMware in a production environment?

Ps. I would have posted links to the versions I have used, but the forum won't let me post links until I have made 5 posts!

Sure, but what is the economic or technical justification?

A legacy application which started life on Openserver 5.0.2, was ported to 5.0.6 when the hardware died and which now needs new hardware again.

Perhaps I should add that they seem to be committed to this application long term, so I was thinking that the next time the hardware died it should be quite simple to find some new hardware that would run VMware instead of worrying about finding something to run SCO.

Is anybody out there using SCO Openserver 5.0.6 on VMware that can tell me what type of virtual hard drive and ethernet card they have used and if they are aware of any problems?

I did not installed Openserver 5.0.6 under VMware, but SCO Unixware 7.1.4. there I used both: IDE and LSI Logic. Both worked for me.
And I am using Bridged Network, and that also works.
I hope this will help in any way.

Thanks for the reply. I note from your other post that for ethernet you are using AMD instead of Intel. Was there a reason for that?