Objective-- I want to boot from any of several small SCSI drives attached to a single controller, but my current (old) controller card appears not to offer that feature in its setup utility.

Is there a popular, reliable SCSI adapter anyone would like to recommend, which allows me to choose my physical SCSI boot drive easily?

Background-- I provide tech support to home-based users, and many of them employ older systems. To stay current with them, I must install the same OS on a bootable partition on my office machine in order to troubleshoot and advise on problem scenarios.

Originallly, my idea was simply to partition a single, large IDE drive into as many sections as I needed. Choosing a boot partition could be managed easily from a software boot manager like System Commander.

However, that approach exposes me to massive loss from a single error in the partition table. Moreover, the more complex my setup, the worse the exposure to other problems becomes.

So, I prefer to install the different OSes on the respective SCSI drives, one OS per drive.  This simplifies imaging for backup, as well.

Honestly, I've never seen a plugin BIOS for a SCSI adapter that is nice enough to use to regularly multiboot. For this kind of thing I'd never go past virtualization anyway; I mostly use VMware Workstation for this, but I've been having a play with VirtualBox and that's perfectly adequate too (VirtualPC doesn't really make the grade, IMO).

Given that most everything now supports VMWare's published virtual disk format including free-to-use virtualizers like VirtualBox and VMWare Player and plenty of imaging tools (BESR, ShadowProtect, Ghost Solution Suite among others) which can do P2V/V2P, there's really no downside to using virtualized systems at all and a ton of benefits.

I second the recommendation:  use VMware Workstation 6.  I can say that it does work well with ShadowProtect Deskop.

I've been away from SCSI for a few years now, but used to live there.

You need a SCSI adapter with a bios. Most modern adapters will come with a bios.

Adaptec is the de facto SCSI standard.

You can usually get similar results for cheaper with Tekram, which is what I always used.

LSI Logic is another to look at. Tekram used LSI Logic controller chips. Price range I'd expect in the area of $150 to $250.

I multi-booted several different flavors of Windows on several different SCSI hard drives .. with no problem whatsoever.

Had to work a little mojo when I added Linux to the mix, but if you're not doing that, I can't image you having any problems.

I know zip about VMWare, but both Nigel & Pleo are well-informed, so their opinion is worth considering.

Rad wrote on Apr 14^th, 2008 at 4:16pm:

Adaptec is the de facto SCSI standard.

Yeah, before I wrote my first reply I fired up an IBM xSeries server I have here with a dual Adaptec RAID controller integrated on the motherboard to remind myself what you could do with it and frankly, although Adaptec SCSIselect does let you do useful stuff it's a million miles short of the convenience you get with virtualization.

If you don't want to shell out the $$ for a VMware 6 Workstation license (and it's worth it, no question), VirtualBox is sufficiently close to it in many respects (has snapshots, etc) to give you 90% of the utility so and I recommend grabbing the free-for-personal use edition of it and taking it for a whirl.

wrote on Apr 14^th, 2008 at 7:00pm:

I fired up an IBM xSeries server I have here with a dual Adaptec RAID controller

Well, if Nigel has used *both* Adaptec SCSI (high-end) and VMWare, then he is obviously in a better position to say what would be a better option.

I have only used SCSI .. up to Tekram DC390-U3W. So, in this situation, I defer to his (superior) experience.

Out of curiosity, I checked to see how much WMWare costs:

http://www.vmware.com/vmwarestore/buy_workstation.html

$189, but I think it can be had for ~$160, if you get it from a reseller.

Rad wrote on Apr 14^th, 2008 at 7:17pm:

$189, but I think it can be had for ~$160, if you get it from a reseller.

And then you need a license for the WinXP etc that you run in the VM. Is that correct?

Brian wrote on Apr 14^th, 2008 at 7:44pm:

And then you need a license for the WinXP etc that you run in the VM. Is that correct?

Pretty much, which is why there aren't any Windows-based appliances in the VMware marketplace to run using Player other than eval editions supplied by MS themselves. However, particularly when you use a lot of snapshots you can use the one core activated license install in many more interesting ways, and they are all there at your fingertips all the time (just not more than one at once concurrently). No stuffing about with partitioning and multiboot conflicts ever, no struggles with dissimilar hardware, etc.

Rad wrote on Apr 14^th, 2008 at 4:16pm:

I've been away from SCSI for a few years now, but used to live there.

Rad, this is somewhat a surprise to me after I just read (briefly) through your Radified Guide to SCSI, a 14-chapter paean to a mixed SCSI and IDE hardware environment.

Nonetheless, your move to what I presume to be a virtualized desktop confirms what Nigel, Brian and Pleonasm said.

Although you defer to others on this forum, I salute your working experience with SCSI and IDE in hybrid combination. Like you, I found the cost per gb for SCSI was unmanageable, so I moved most of my heavy frieght over to IDE drives, leaving SCSI for OS and other program code.

Thanks to all who replied-- your answers were prompt, expert and very helpful.

wrote on Apr 14^th, 2008 at 9:51pm:

No stuffing about with partitioning and multiboot conflicts ever,

Damn. Now that I'm on top of all that, I've got to start again.

alphaa10 wrote on Apr 14^th, 2008 at 10:29pm:

Rad, this is somewhat a surprise

My life changed in ways that required mobility. Hence laptop. But don't think I'm not suffering with the painfully slow access times. Seems like I'm forever watching my disk access light, waiting for it to finish one task, so I can give it another.

Some day I'll be back with 15K SCSI, but that day isn't today.


alphaa10 wrote on Apr 14^th, 2008 at 10:29pm:

paean

Had to look up that one:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/paean

1. any song of praise, joy, or triumph.  
2. a hymn of invocation or thanksgiving to Apollo or some other ancient Greek deity.  

I like that word.  :)

Brian wrote on Apr 14^th, 2008 at 7:44pm:

And then you need a license for the WinXP etc that you run in the VM. Is that correct?

Brian and Nigel, if my intent is to run a particular OS to virtualize a client's environment while working on his problem, is the particular MS license used to make the original, physical installation of the OS (shrinkwrapped, OEM version of XP) version enough to satisfy MS?

A more casual reader might interpret your comments are requiring two OS licenses-- one for the base, and one for the VM.

That's a tricky one, for several reasons:
- it isn't related to virtualisation as such really, but the whole business that you are carrying out,
-  I don't know what MS really intend (I know what we intend with our licensing, so I can make a pretty well-informed guess, but that's not the same thing as knowing)
- whatever I say here, because I work for a software vendor it's the nature of things that somewhere will try and misrepresent my personal views as my employer's official policy and/or some massive piece of hipocrisy.
- I live in a country where the legal system works on a fundamentally different basis to yours, and in particular where concepts representing values such as "being fair" are actually the letter of the law, and moreover that intent matters (an oft-used principle is that the "substance" of an arrangement matters more than the "form").

With that background, I certainly have some thoughts to offer, which are mostly which just repeating what I think are some more useful principles to approach these things with than being legalistic.

- MS have a reasonable right to insist that when someone uses Windows, that they have paid for it somehow so that there is no question about theft. Their activation and licensing process work in both directions here - they exist both to give the purchaser a ready proof that it was paid for as well as to provide evidence of intent to use in bad faith. But actually, the activation/licensing mechanisms aren't much more than that, and they aren't where the substance of things really lies.
- How much you pay for a copy of Windows - OEM versus retail, upgrade versus standalone -  is a separate question, but I think it's reasonable to point at the general feature of commerce, that such transactions are carried out in good faith, and with the intent that both parties derived benefits from the transaction.
- the purpose of pricing is largely just to form a crude, forward-looking first approximation at trying to divide up the future value inherent in the product being traded, and that
- if it ever came to a dispute, the real end game of the dispute resolution process, carried out in good faith, would be to try and divide up that value in a backward-looking way on the basis of the value actually realised.

To add to this, you should take a good look at the license for Windows PE in the WAIK, and the specific license clauses granted there: to use it in not just installing Windows, but also to recover Windows installs (IOW, using Windows for the purpose of fixing Windows), and factor that into your personal moral judgment when you decide what to do.

You could, for instance, choose to infer from the WAIK licensing, for instance, that Microsoft tacitly recognise maintenance of Windows as a situation where you are not personally deriving value from using Windows as a product; you could choose to give higher standing to the principle that every use of Windows needs to be paid for, but feel once you have assured that you have more than enough genuine licenses to cover your customers, yourself, plus a couple spares to "split the difference"; you could decide that the only right cause is to pay for two licenses.

Honestly, what I think matters most of all is that you've considered all the options, and honestly feel you are doing the right thing, whatever you decide. If you were to bump into one of the Windows kernel developers and get to know them, if you could look that person in the eye and have a clear conscience that you've done the right thing, that's more important than the legalities.

That's my NZD$0.02 - sorry if that answer is a bit too wishy-washy.

All that said, when it comes to the software I actually use for work we pay Microsoft a huge chunk o' change annually for MSDN Universal subscriptions and volume license keys and all the rest for every developer, so my personal moral decisions are taken well and truly out of the equation, but if I was a sole trader or consultant or something those are the principles I'd apply in deciding what to do.

Quote:

…if my intent is to run a particular OS to virtualize a client's environment while working on his problem, is the particular MS license used to make the original, physical installation of the OS (shrink wrapped, OEM version of XP) version enough to satisfy MS?

I have no legal expertise to offer, so you should call the Licensing Department at Microsoft (800-426-9400) to get the right answer.

As a practical matter, based on my experience, you do need a separate product key to activate Windows on the virtual machine (VM), since the VM is in fact a distinct machine, just like a second PC.  I suspect that if you activate Windows on the VM using the same product key as that used by your customer, one of the two (or both) installations of Windows will be detected as “non-genuine”.

As a practical matter, based on my experience, you do need a separate product key to activate Windows on the virtual machine (VM), since the VM is in fact a distinct machine, just like a second PC.  I suspect that if you activate Windows on the VM using the same product key as that used by your customer, one of the two (or both) installations of Windows will be detected as “non-genuine”.
---
Thanks-- that answer is clear enough. (Nigel was at somewhat of a disadvantage from NZ). However, the "dual-licensing requirement" is probably an issue to many who would run Windows virtualized. It confirms, for me at least, the wisdom of running a non-virtual setup whenever possible-- not only with the benefit of speed, but now, half the cost of any OS license.

Quote:

It confirms, for me at least, the wisdom of running a non-virtual setup whenever possible-- not only with the benefit of speed, but now, half the cost of any OS license.

Alphaa10, the use of a virtual machine (VM) versus a physical PC is irrelevant to the OS license issue.  You can’t use the same Windows product key on two PCs – whether virtual or physical, to the best of my knowledge.  I would be surprised if the Windows Genuine Advantage security tool didn’t detect the duplicate license in use.

Again, I encourage you to simply pick up the phone and call Microsoft to find out what can and cannot be properly done.

Pleonasm,

It certainly is confusing. Dan Goodell has a good summary.....

http://www.goodells.net/virtualpc/


Quote:

I am not a lawyer and hope never to be one, so this is not a legal interpretation. I am presenting the information here just to make the reader aware of issues concerning the End-User License Agreements (EULAs) in Microsoft's copyrighted operating systems. Microsoft's EULAs are not exactly clear when it comes to installing one copy of Windows multiple times on a single computer. This practice evidently wasn't imagined back when the EULAs were written. Even the experts can't agree on precisely how to interpret them. Visit any of Microsoft's official newsgroups (such as microsoft.public.windowsxp.general) and you'll find the MVPs (the moderators) will argue with each other over whether multibooting duplicate installations of a single copy of XP is allowed. People have even called Redmond to get an official position, and have ended up with conflicting answers from different customer support reps. Most reasoned arguments seem to conclude that multibooting duplicate installations with a single license is permissible as long as the duplicate installations are on a single machine and the copies cannot be run simultaneously. In the case of virtual machines, however, copies can be run simultaneously, so that argument can't be used. In the case of virtual machines, all the experts seem to be in agreement--each copy of an OS installed in a virtual machine is supposed to have its own license. If you have an oem version of an operating system, remember that virtual machines use an emulated bios. The OS may not work if it's designed to look for certain cues in an oem bios.

That’s a nice summary, Brian.

I do agree that there has been much published ‘confusion’ about using a single Windows license multiple times in a multi-boot manner on one PC, and I don’t know the “official” answer on this question.

However, unless I am misunderstanding, Alphaa10 appears to be installing an image of one of his customer’s PC on his own PC for support purposes.  That isn’t a multi-boot situation – it is two instances of one Windows license on two separate PCs.  It seem a questionable practice to me, but again:  I have no ability to offer a legal opinion, just the advice that Alphaa10 might wish to contact Microsoft directly to pursue the issue.

Well, licensing is such a blunt instrument that the fundamental confusion won't ever go away. Software manufacturers in general face a problem, which is the users they want to keep happy are the honest ones, but almost any freedom you grant to the nice people will be ruthlessly exploited by the smaller, but disproportionately disruptive, collection of folks with dishonest mindsets who have the time and energy to spend on gaming the system.

And this is a fundamental problem with human beings; look at the way "griefing" behaviours emerge in things like online games. The developers of these games face amazing challenges trying to manage cheating and prevent grossly antisocial behaviour.

These things are worse in online worlds because anonymity shields people from the negative consequences of their behaviour on other people. When it comes to real-world issues that put people versus corporations, some of the mental tricks individuals use with things like piracy are I suspect similarly rooted in the anonymity of the corporation. As soon as people can disconnect themselves from the idea that they are doing something which actually does harm other people, then the game changes.

By the way, in respect of this viewpoint about virtualization:

alphaa10 wrote on Apr 15^th, 2008 at 1:42pm:

the wisdom of running a non-virtual setup whenever possible-- not only with the benefit of speed,

Leaving aside how far this is off the mark with respect to licensing, it's completely the wrong way to understand VM performance.

Actually, the only noticeable overhead they have is in emulating I/O, because the normal user code in the VM is almost completely running natively on the CPU. The bulk of what virtualization penalty you experience comes not from the virtualization process itself as such, but rather it comes from having the virtual environment running on top of a full-blown desktop OS leading to a trip through the host OS's filesystem.

If you eliminate the host OS (run, say, VMWare ESX or something similar which is just a thin bare-metal hypervisor) virtualization imposes virtually no overhead, and the benefits remain immense. So immense, in fact, that the surprising effect of virtualization is that at a large enough scale, things can get faster.

The big thing that virtualization does by allowing things that would previously run as separate machines or be on separate disks to all run shared on the same hardware is lift overall resource utilization immensely.

Normally, machines have to be provisioned to deal with peak loads, rather than their averages. As long as the loads on different machines are not closely correlated, by using virtualization to get them consolidated on shared hardware you can use the cost savings on other things, such as 15K RPM disks or dual redundant power supples, and get the benefits of those things on all the VMs.

When you combine that with the ability to move VM images around to hardware and provision them on the fly based on load - which is what you can see in action with Amazon EC2, for instance, which will even replicate the things around the world for you - the results of doing things to increase the average load factor of machines up higher is big savings overall that you can invest instead in doing things that benefit all the VMs which wouldn't be cost-effective if the machines were physically separate.

Pleonasm said, "I have no legal expertise to offer, so you should call the Licensing Department at Microsoft (800-426-9400) to get the right answer."
---
Thanks also to Pleo for the number to MS licensing. I probably should not call these people, but my curiosity about the whole issue needs resolution.

To build upon the prior comments of Nigel Bree, one of the performance characteristics of VMware Workstation is its ability to share memory between the host and guest:


Quote:

VMware uses a page sharing technique to allow guest memory pages with identical contents to be stored as a single copy‐on‐write page. Many workloads present opportunities for sharing memory across virtual machines. For example, several virtual machines might be running instances of the same guest operating system, have the same applications or components loaded, or contain common data. With memory sharing, a workload often consumes less memory than it would when running on a physical machine. As a result, the system can support higher levels of over commitment efficiently.

In addition, a VM can be configured to access a physical disk on the host system; or a virtual disk, the storage of which can be either pre-allocated, or can grow dynamically as needed.  These three options disk provide, in order, the best-to-good range of performance.

Alphaa10, please report back on what you learn from your conversations with Microsoft regarding the licensing issues.

I called MS at 800-426-9400, and spent the next 35 minutes being shuffled around the phone tree. I never have encountered so many people at a single company who cannot speak clearly and expeditiously to a customer. The voices were slurred, rapid or heavily accented-- or all three. (This was not outsourced to India, but somewhere in the US)

The MS number above is general purpose, and requires the caller to understand he or she must request licensing. At the initial operator, the caller is told the call will be transferred. The call is dropped, or the call meets a recording which states the number is no longer in service. Af the second attempt, the caller is told to call presales. The call is routinely dropped.  A third call finds the MS number busy.

It appears customer service is uneven, at best, for Microsoft.

Pleonasm said, "However, unless I am misunderstanding, Alphaa10 appears to be installing an image of one of his customer’s PC on his own PC for support purposes.  That isn’t a multi-boot situation – it is two instances of one Windows license on two separate PCs."
---
Now I understand where some of the confusion in this discussion comes from-- I do not run my clients' images on my own system. Aside from understanble privacy concerns from the customers, my only objective is to replicate the problem on a healthy OS.  To this end, I merely duplicate the behavior of the client who met a problem.

Any licensing issue that might arise comes from running multiple copies of the same OS product key. As one poster observes, the old Borland argument that multiple installation to, say, a laptop and an office desktop, does not violate the license so long as both are not used simultanously, no longer applies with a VM.

The whole licensing landscape is in a state of "aftershock" from the invasion of VMs. None of the companies wants to appear greedy, but appearances aside, most are hounded by the thought of how much loot they might extract by a different licensing regime. Just as MS "discovered" that it could keep its mighty river of revenue from Windows licenses flowing by moving to a subscription model, the VM probably will bring something on the same order, no longer based on a count of machines.  

But what is "fair"? MS can speak for its own interests, but these, too, rest on customers who buy their licenses. Without paying customers-- ie. customers rejecting MS terms and moving elsewhere-- MS attorneys will be forced to find a new career. And MS might be forced, once again terrified at the prospect of losing its revenue stream, into being nicer to the customers who made it obscenely weallthy.