RS232 over IP and VMWare

[mdonovan]

I have this idea, and I wanted to get the experts opinion on this. I would like to run my HA software on a VM. Since VMWare only supports 4 serial ports (or so they say, I never got it to see more than two), I was thinking I would have a small PC (physical hardware) with enough serial ports for my interfaces (5 or 6), and run one of the utilities that converts RS232 to IP and use that for the HA software on the VM to talk to the serial interfaces on the physical PC.

My main reason for doing this is to avoid any hassles with product activation that ties the software to a particular PC (which I despise).

Will this work? What I was wondering is if the serial port to IP software will allow me to create over 4 virtual serial ports on a vm. Does anyone have any recommendations about which RS232 to IP software to use?

Thanks for any and all advice
Matt

 

[gregoryx]

Hey! I had the same ideas and tested them all out a year ago!

I moved to a Comtrol RocketPort that gave me as many serial ports as I want - and the all appear "native" to the XP OS (or W2K3). I used an 8-port unit and ran five ports. Worked for everything except Insteon SDM, which was REALLY picky about serial timing and I was only able to get it to work on the local serial ports.

I moved to VM for the same reason (if different software): quick fail-over for Main Lobby Server. I found that the hardware-based licensing looked right past VMware regardless of what I did. I also found that there was a - very small, but noticeable - performance hit. In the same time-frame, we were testing VMware with a phone system and confirmed that it will NOT work with real-time apps (confirmed by VMware). This explained the occasional performance changes, though HA is certainly not "real time".

I moved away from VMware.

I still used the Comtrol and it works great. SFF PC with unlimited serial ports... nice.

 

[electron]

I do this at work with Virtual PC and the 'Serial to Ethernet' software by Eltima. I have several rocket port cards, each supporting up to 16 serial ports, and setup the Eltima software to map those ports to IP. Then I use the free hw_vsp utility in the virtual machine to create these ports. Eventho the Virtual Server platform only supports a few com ports, it works fine when creating virtual com ports. I have the same results with Virtual PC, so I am sure VMware will work.

 

[mdonovan]

Do you mean the application looked directly at the host machine you were running the VM on, and ignored the VM? That's a real bummer. But at least part of the idea is possible, since electron is doing that already. This activation garbage and tying an application to a single PC just stinks.

Thanks for the replies. They were very helpful.

Matt

 

[electron]

Gregory, what do you mean by real time apps? I am pretty sure I am doing anything you can do with a Virtual machine, so I am interested in learning about that one. I would check out Virtual Server (or virtual pc if you want sound), a better platform IMO.

Also, can you clarify this statement:

I found that the hardware-based licensing looked right past VMware regardless of what I did.

I would be surprised if the Cinemar folks figured out how to break out of the VM, it's pretty hard to do.

 

[DavidL]

electron, Cinemar didn't intentionally do anything re: VMWare. Some of our users have started to use VM (and other similar solutions), but we, Cinemar, aren't doing anything special to support VM or any hacks.

 

[electron]

Yea that's what I figured, I probably just misunderstood that statement.

 

[deranged]

I use VMWare and Virtual PC on a regular basis, I personally like the VMWare but performance or stability has nothing to do with it.

I like the VMWare interface ( options ) more, and I can stretch a virtual machine across 2 monitors. ( virtual pc has a limit and doesn't stretch all the way across both my monitors ).

StevenE

 

[gregoryx]

Gregory, what do you mean by real time apps? I am pretty sure I am doing anything you can do with a Virtual machine, so I am interested in learning about that one. I would check out Virtual Server (or virtual pc if you want sound), a better platform IMO.

Also, can you clarify this statement:

I found that the hardware-based licensing looked right past VMware regardless of what I did.

I would be surprised if the Cinemar folks figured out how to break out of the VM, it's pretty hard to do.

Voice. Don't use virtual machines for voice applications. Not supported by VMware or Microsoft or most of the VoIP vendors. That's the only thing that really doesn't work - and only when you really want it to.

Short of the licensing is that the CPU ID presented in the VM is apparently the actual processor ID that it's sitting on, so moving the VM to another hardware platform breaks the licenses. Since that pretty much killed my main reason for using a VM, I stopped using it.

 

[mdonovan]

Gregory - That's interesting about the CPU Id being passed to the VM being the same as the physical CPU. Never thought about that. (That's why I ask the experts ) I'll need to dig in further on this.

Matt

 

[electron]

I forgot about the CPU info, that's the only piece of virtual hardware that would be identical to the host system (assuming you aren't talking about Intel's bios based CPU ID, that can be turned off). I am surprised that licensing info would be tied to that.

You also might want to check out Virtual Box. It's a great free app which runs XP just fine. I don't have an active XP machine installed, or I would check for myself to see if the CPU info remains intact.

As for VoIP, I have done VoIP in virtual machines, without any issues, but I can see why it isn't officially supported.