Like me, you may have a few high I/O windows machines in your enviroment, for us its mainly mailservers, and after realising the performance benefits of the paravirtualised drivers in vSphere (along with them being supported for boot disks in windows), I wanted to move a few servers to use these drivers.
On an existing machine, you may not have seperate boot and data vmdk’s, if you just change the driver to pvscsi you can look forward to a bluescreen on boot, as Windows won’t have loaded in the drivers you need.
- Ensure you are running ESX4 U1, as boot disks using the pvscsi driver are not supported in earlier releases (it may work, but if something goes wrong VMware won’t want to know!)
- Make sure your VMware tools install is up to date.
- Add a new data disk to your VM, and select the virtual device node as SCSI 1:0 rather than 0:1/2/3 etc, this will add a new controller just for that disk.
- Change the adapter that is created to be ‘paravirtualised’ drom the default LSI Parallel and boot the VM.
- Once its booted, and the drivers have been installed, you can shut the VM down, remove the temp disk you created and change the adapter for your main disk to paravirtualised.
- Boot the box and all should be well, if you have any problems you can change back to the LSI driver and try again 🙂
Enjoy the increased performance!
*Please note these instructions are provided for use at your own risk, while they worked fine for me on quite a few machines your setup may be different, so take a snapshot and make sure you have a backup!*
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