XenServer passing 9-Pin serial to specific VM
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So it appears we have a 9-Pin serial cable going into one of the servers we want to virtualize, ideally we'd like to completely get rid of this host and have it be fully virtual.
How can I pass this serial to a specific VM in XS.
Has anyone had to do this, I'm sure someone has, but I'm not even sure where to begin looking at this. (more to the pile).
Worst case we can move this system onto a cheap system (or a re-purposed server) for just this function.
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Can you use a Serial to IP converter of some sort? I did this with an old Digi Port server I had laying around and their software under Hyper V for a 2003 server we needed a serial port on and it worked for what we needed at the time
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I'm not certain if we can use a Serial to IP converter, maybe, not sure if it's worthwhile to invest any hardware cost for this.
The hosts do have a serial connection on each server.
But as I'm thinking about this, because the VM's are able to migrate around between the hosts trying to pass a single serial from one host to the VM would be problematic at the very least.
I'm going to recommend that we just re-purpose an old server for this task, with a clean installation and import of the program / database hosted.
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Thats the beauty of serial to IP, so long as the server can get to the IP of the serial adapter who cares which host its on (when serial to IP WORKS of course)
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Depending on your needs, you can find a fairly cheap RS232 to Ethernet adapter on Ebay. I did this once for an old digital telephone system that had a serial interface for changing settings.
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@Danp And what is fairly cheap? From a very brief google search I'm seeing this things in the ~$100 range.
Re-purposing an old system would cost an hour of time.
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This is similar to the one that I used.
Lots of other options.
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$100 is cheap enough it's worth a test. I have used the StarTech NetRS232 units... I've used both the dual port and the 4 port adapters and they have been great!
Is the single port one... It's $80 bucks on Amazon.
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I actually found my original notes on the project at the time. This was the site I referenced and amazingly it is still posted!:
http://svintinner.blogspot.com/2008/09/adding-serial-port-to-vm-on-esxi.html.
My difference was I used a real digi 8 port Terminal adapter but it supported the real port divers
