OS2 on vSphere

[tcross]

Since VMware now announced OS2 guest support, we have a customer that we would like to move off of older hardware onto VMs. I have gotten OS2 Warp 4 and OS Warp for e-Business running but I still have a few questions:

1) Looks like there may be support for the e1000 network adapter but I cannot get any available drivers to work. So far, I am only stuck with the Flexible adapter.

2) I cannot get OS2 for e-business to start with more than one processor. If I install the OS with 2 procs, it detects SMP support and has it checked during the install but when the OS actually goes to load after the install, it abends. If I go back to one proc, it loads fine.

Has anyone had any experience with these issues?

[agesen]

Regarding 1), we have recently idenfied an e1000 emulation issue that affects

OS2. The best choice at this point is to use "flexible" (this is the adapter with

which we did all of our internal OS2 QA). The e1000 bug is understood and it

will be fixed in a future update release, but I don't have an exact ETA for this

yet. We track this internally as bug #428786 (just fyi).

Regarding 2), I'll have someone look into this.

Thanks,

Ole

[RParker]

2) I cannot get OS2 for e-business to start with more than one processor

As with all multi CPU VM's it's best to start with 1 and then move to 2 if you really need it. So test it first, then worry about if you have performance issues later. You may not even notice OS2 running with 1 CPU, especially since you acknowledge this is better hardware anyway...

[agesen]

Regarding 2). At this point, we do not recommend using OS2 with more than

one vcpu. It was an oversight that the UI allowed this to be selected. Thanks

for bringing this to our attention.

I would be interested in learning more about your experience with OS2. Feel

free to post an update to this thread sometime down the line and I will certainly

read it and respond as necessary. You are also welcome to email me directly,

if you prefer.

Sincerely,

Ole

[tcross]

So far, it seems to be running OK. Haven't loaded up an application yet. Our next step maybe to try to P2V an OS2 server to see how well that works. Otherwise, we will be doing rebuilds on these servers.

At this point, the Intel NIC issue would be a nice to have. I seemed to get around the crappy 640x480x16 color scheme by finding a SciTech display driver which can take me all the way to 1024x768x64K.

Tim

[blueneaker]

Hi, and im glad im not the only one working on OS/2 in the vSphere platform!, here is what we have found up to date

• We are running a POC for deploying Virtual OS/2 workstations to multiple users using vSphere, the way we have configured the VM's is by using some inhouse legacy Ghost images (Ghost 7), these VM's have booted fine with no issues

• During the end user expereince testing, it was hightlighted that the mouse cursor was very choppy\laggy

Tim, im interested in the graphics driver that you have used - is there any chance you could let me know where you got it from? so we can test

Overall at the moment vSphere and OS/2 seems fairly painless - i have in the past attempted to get OS/2 running on ESXi3.5 and this just wasnt really supportably possible!

Cheers

Kev

[tcross]

I believe I used the IBM SDD drivers from here:

sddse704.exe

Give this a try.

[VMScot]

I've just used VMware converter 4.0.1 to P2V a couple of my OS/2 Warp 3 servers from some ancient Compaq Proliants . It worked fine. I'm just trying to get the NICs configured. I'm running vSphere.