Comments on: Installing RHEL 5 using the VMware Paravirtualized SCSI driver (pvscsi)

By: Graham

Graham — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 02:42:08 +0000

Thanks for the link! Since I do the VMware tools install during the kickstart phase, it looks like ‘Flexible’ will give me an Vlance adaptor during the kickstart stage and then a VMXNET adaptor once the machine reboots.

I suspect that RHEL6 supports VMXNET3 out of the box, so I will try change my templated kickstart file to default to that on creation, so the ‘sucking packages’ part will go through VMXNET3. Paravirtualized goodness

By: RomanT

RomanT — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 09:01:40 +0000

Mr G,

Checkout vmware kb on the various types. As of 4.1, just go for VMXNET if you have VMtools installed. Although problem will be within the vmmaker ‘director’ – you’re sucking packages down pre-vmtools. Could always change it after…

Anyway – I’ll leave you with that

Cheers.,

By: Graham

Graham — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 01:05:33 +0000

Hi Lucien,

Thanks for writing back, glad it helped out. From what I’ve heard VMXNET 3 is always recommended, while PVSCSI is a bit more mixed. On my VMs their network card type is often marked as ‘flexible’ which I don’t really understand – should go back at investigate this a bit more. I do the vmware tools install in the kickstart as well (I love the –default option) .

Have a good one,

Graham.

By: Lucien Hercaud

Lucien Hercaud — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 15:56:09 +0000

ReHi

Actually all worked very well and I’m very gratefull to the original post.

I used the same method to add the vmxnet and vmxnet3 modules so that a network
installation can go on. The boot.ISO is less than 20M. All the rest of the magic now happens in kickstart (%post) and the vmware tools get installed on the on-disk image.

Regards

By: Graham

Graham — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 22:28:38 +0000

Hey Jarrett,

Great, I thought it might. Thanks very much for letting us know. I’m looking forward to CentOS 6 too

Cheers,

Graham.

By: Jarrett Lee

Jarrett Lee — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 19:24:11 +0000

RHEL6 has the pvscsi module built-in. No need to do any of this for RHEL6. I can only assume that CentOS 6 will be the same way when they finally get around to doing a release.

By: Graham

Graham — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 02:42:05 +0000

Hi Lucien,

I’m sorry the technique didn’t work for you. Thanks for replying with your method.

Which version of RHEL were you using? I haven’t tried it with 6 yet.

It is easier to do it your way if you’re doing it once, but I was trying to automate it so I could run it every time I build a new VM. I think your method could probably be adapted to be run completely hands off too.

By: Lucien Hercaud

Lucien Hercaud — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 14:00:03 +0000

Hello
I replaced isolinux/initrd.img onto the RedHat DVD with the one modified as described above. With this the installation goes “finger in the nose”.

As an extra, I created (onto the same DVD) a directory where I copied the VMwareGuestAdditions RPM.
Last, boot the same DVD in “linux rescue” (F2) mode and say you want the FileSystems mounted from the freshly installed OS, then mount the DVD onto /mnt/sysimage/cdrom (mkdir first), chroot as advised and “rpm -U VMwareGuestAdditions” followed by the run of the *.pl command (as advised) will make your disk bootable on to of the paravirtual SCSI driver.

By: Graham

Graham — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 21:55:11 +0000

Hey Sebastian,

Yeah that is to be expected. You need to relink the pvscsi kernel modules back to the new kernel that you’ve installed. Running the vmware-config-tools.pl script should do it for you.

Cheers,

Graham.

By: Sebastian

Sebastian — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 01:32:30 +0000

Graham, it seems that whenever you upgrade the kernel you lose the paravirtualized driver, don’t you?